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Scalloped Corn
1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 1 pint fresh corn or drained canned corn 1 cup bread crumbs 1/8 cup cream 1 1/2 cups hot milk Heat the milk in a double boiler. Mix the butter and flour together, and add the hot milk, stirring meanwhile. Then add the fresh cut corn, salt and sugar. Bring to the boiling point, and turn into baking dish. Cover the top with the bread crumbs, moistened slightly with the cream, and bake fifteen to twenty minutes. A tablespoon of butter may be used instead of the cream.
A plain white-sauce corn pudding with a crumb top. The original assumes you know your own oven, so the two things to supply are a temperature and a little judgment about the sauce.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; a moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits it. Fifteen to twenty minutes is only enough to brown the crumbs and set the surface, since the corn mixture goes in already at the boil.
- Cook the rouxButter and flour are simply "mixed" here and the hot milk added. Let the paste bubble a minute in the pan before the milk goes in, or the sauce keeps a raw-flour taste that the short bake will not cook out.
- A pint of cornTwo cups by volume - roughly three to four ears of fresh corn cut from the cob, or one to two standard 15-oz cans, drained to make two cups. Frozen kernels work; thaw and drain them first so they do not thin the sauce.
- 1/8 cup creamTwo tablespoons. It serves mainly to dampen the crumbs so they brown rather than scorch; the recipe offers a tablespoon of butter as an alternative.
- Bread crumbsDry crumbs from stale bread rather than the fine sandy commercial kind or panko. Coarse, slightly uneven crumbs give a better crust.
- The double boilerUsed only to heat the milk without catching it. A heavy saucepan over low heat does the same thing in less time.
- YieldAbout a quart of finished mixture; four servings as a main dish, six as a side. A 1 1/2-quart baking dish leaves room for the crumb layer.
Books of "meatless cookery" multiplied in the United States around the First World War, when the Food Administration urged households to observe meatless and wheatless days so that meat and wheat could be shipped abroad; corn, milk and eggs were the substitutes promoted hardest, and a dish like this — filling, cheap, built on a milk sauce — belongs to that moment. "Scalloped" is generally traced to food served or baked in a scallop shell, and by the nineteenth century had come to mean anything baked in a dish under a crust of buttered crumbs. The tablespoon of sugar is not a modern sweet tooth: the sugars in picked corn convert to starch fairly quickly, and a little sugar may have been intended to bring the flavor back to canned or day-old corn.