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Southern Corn Pudding
Score twelve good sized ears of corn and with a dull knife press out the pulp. Add a teaspoonful of salt, a quarter teaspoonful of pepper and a pint of milk. Beat four eggs separately until very light, add first the yolks, then stir in the whites. Turn the mixture into a baking dish and bake in a quick oven until a nice brown and thoroughly set-that is, when you shake the dish the centre seems firm. If the pudding is cooked too long it becomes curdled and watery; if not long enough, too liquid.
A corn custard, not a dessert pudding, and it lives or dies by how long it stays in the oven. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: pull it earlyThe original is right that overbaking curdles the egg and weeps water. Take it out when the centre still wobbles slightly as a single mass rather than sloshing; it firms up in the ten minutes after it leaves the oven.
- "Quick oven"Usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-425F; the recipe itself gives no temperature. At that heat an egg custard this shallow may brown before the middle sets, so watch it closely, and if the top colours too fast drop the heat or set the dish in a pan of hot water for the remainder.
- Scoring the earsRun a knife tip down the centre of each row of kernels, then scrape with the back of a dull knife or a spoon to press out the pulp and milk while leaving the tough hulls on the cob. That starchy liquid is what thickens the pudding, so scrape the cobs hard.
- How much cornTwelve good-sized ears give roughly 3 to 4 cups of pulp. Use fresh sweet corn in season; frozen kernels will work but lack the cob milk, so expect a looser, less silky set.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. Whole milk gives the texture the recipe expects; skim milk sets thinner and thinner still if the corn is watery.
- Beating the eggs separatelyYolks whipped light, whites beaten light and stirred in last, as the recipe directs. This lightens the custard rather than leavening it, and the volume falls on standing, so get the dish into the oven promptly.
- Dish and yieldUse a buttered baking dish of at least 2 1/2 quarts; the mixture is too bulky for a 2-quart dish filled two-thirds. Serves six to eight as a side, and it is best warm rather than hot.
Corn pudding belongs to a family of Southern and mid-Atlantic dishes built on the milky pulp of green (immature) sweet corn, a use of maize learned from Native American cookery and carried into colonial kitchens, where eggs and dairy turned it into a baked custard. The scoring-and-scraping method appears in many older recipes, apparently because the hulls of earlier varieties were coarser than those of modern sweet corn. The warning at the end, that a curdled watery pudding means too long and a liquid one too little, is the kind of doneness cue recipe writers relied on when few home ovens had a thermometer.