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Custard Corn
Mrs. W. J. Fendick. 1 can corn 1/2 C flour 1 C milk 2 eggs, beaten 1 t sugar Salt and pepper Pour into buttered pan and drop bits of butter on top. Bake slowly for about one hour, stirring occasionally. 1 T butter 2 T flour 1 C milk 1 can corn Mrs. Eleanor Suydam.
A plain baked corn custard of the church-supper type, printed with the usual community-cookbook economy: no pan size, no oven temperature, no yield. The trailing four ingredients belong to a second, separate recipe.
- Two recipes, one blockEverything from "1 T butter" onward appears to be the ingredient list for Mrs. Suydam's version, printed without its method. Make Mrs. Fendick's recipe as written and ignore the tail, or treat the second list as a white-sauce creamed corn and supply your own method.
- "Bake slowly"Read this as a slow oven, somewhere in the region of 300-325F; period usage varied. The low heat matters: an egg-and-milk custard baked hot will curdle and weep.
- A can of cornA modern can is roughly 15-16 oz, drained weight about 11 oz; older cans of corn were often larger (the No. 2 can, around 20 oz), so the original may have been a wetter, more generous measure. Whole-kernel is the safer reading; cream-style will make the mixture noticeably looser and sweeter. Two cups of drained frozen or fresh kernels substitutes for a modern can.
- The flour is heavyHalf a cup of flour to one cup of milk and two eggs gives a dense, sliceable pudding rather than a custard. If you want something closer to spoonbread, two to three tablespoons is nearer modern proportion, but the original amount is not a misprint pattern you can dismiss.
- Stirring occasionallyMost likely this keeps the flour from settling into a paste at the bottom during the first half of the bake. Stirring twice in the first 30 minutes and then leaving it alone lets the top set and brown.
- Pan and donenessAn 8-inch square or a 1 1/2-quart dish. It is done when the center is set and a knife comes out clean; an hour at 300F is about right for that depth, less if you spread it thinner.
- Seasoning"Salt and pepper" with a single teaspoon of sugar means about 3/4 teaspoon salt for this volume. Canned corn is often already sweetened, so taste before adding the sugar.
- YieldSix modest side servings.
Corn puddings like this one sit at the point where a vegetable dish and a custard meet, and they were standard American church-supper food because they were cheap, stretched to feed a table, and could be assembled from the pantry in February. The key ingredient is the can: commercially canned sweet corn was widely available and inexpensive by the late nineteenth century, and it freed cooks from the short late-summer window when fresh corn was worth cutting off the cob. Compiled cookbooks were often printed as fundraisers, with each contributor sending in a favorite in her own shorthand, which is why oven temperatures, pan sizes and yields are so often missing -- the women reading it already knew what a slow oven was -- and why two submissions for the same dish can end up run together on the page.