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Sweet Corn Pudding
1 can sweet corn 1/2 C milk 2 T flour 3 eggs, beaten light 3 T melted butter Salt and pepper Pour mixture in buttered baking dish, and bake in a hot oven threequarters of an hour.
A plain egg custard bound with corn, of the sort that turns up in every Midwestern church cookbook. The only real problem is the oven temperature, which will scramble the eggs before the centre sets.
- "A hot oven" is wrong for a custardPeriod tables generally gloss a hot oven as somewhere around 400-450F, and three-quarters of an hour at that heat will curdle an egg-and-milk mixture and weep liquid. Bake at 350F instead, and expect roughly the same three-quarters of an hour in a shallow dish.
- The canCanned sweet corn of the period came in various sizes, commonly around a pint to a No. 2 can (roughly 20 oz), so a modern 15-16 oz can is in the right neighbourhood but may be somewhat smaller. Drain it if it is packed in heavy liquid, or the pudding will be loose; cream-style corn is a different thing and will not set the same way.
- Flour into liquid, not into eggsWhisk the 2 tablespoons of flour into the 1/2 cup of cold milk until smooth before anything else goes in. Added to the beaten eggs directly it lumps, and the lumps do not cook out.
- Butter temperatureThree tablespoons of melted butter poured hot into beaten eggs will begin to cook them. Let it cool to barely warm and add it in a thin stream while whisking.
- Beaten lightThis means whole eggs beaten until pale and frothy, not separated and whipped. The air is what gives the pudding its slight lift; it will settle as it cools, which is normal.
- A water bath helpsThe original does not call for one, but setting the dish in a roasting pan with an inch of hot water gives a smoother, more even custard and guards against overcooking at the edges.
- DonenessThe pudding is done when the edges are set and puffed and the centre still trembles slightly; a knife inserted an inch from the middle should come out clean. Carryover heat finishes the centre.
- YieldFour to six as a side dish, in a 1 1/2-quart baking dish. Salt at about 3/4 teaspoon unless the canned corn is already salted.
Corn pudding belongs to the older American habit of treating maize as a custard base rather than a starch, a line that runs back through colonial Indian pudding and the fresh-corn puddings of Virginia and the Chesapeake, where the milky pulp scraped from summer ears supplied both the thickening and the sweetness. What marks this version as later is the can: commercial corn canning expanded enormously in the Midwest after the 1870s, and by the time recipes like this one were being compiled, canned sweet corn was cheap, reliable and available in February. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the genre. Contributors to such collections wrote for neighbours who already knew what a buttered baking dish and a hot oven meant, and saw no reason to spell out what everyone could do from memory.