Home › Fireless Cookery › Baked Corn
Baked Corn
6 ears corn 1 cup boiling milk 1/4 cup butter Salt and pepper Cut the grains from the cobs; add boiling milk, butter, salt and pepper to taste. Put in buttered baking dish; dot with small pieces of butter and bake in cooker for one hour.
A fireless-cooker recipe, which means the heat all goes in at the start and nothing is added later. Translated to a conventional oven it is a simple corn pudding.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated box in which a preheated soapstone or cast-iron radiant, brought to red heat on the range, was sealed in alongside the food. Nothing browns and nothing boils; the dish simply coasts down from its starting temperature over an hour or more.
- The hinge: everything goes in hotThe milk must be at a full boil and the dish should be hot when it is sealed up. A fireless cooker adds no heat, so a lukewarm start means a lukewarm, watery finish. If you are converting to an oven, 350F for 45 to 60 minutes, covered, gives the same soft set.
- YieldSix ears give roughly 3 cups of kernels, which with the milk needs a dish of a quart or a little more, and serves four to six as a side.
- Cut and scrapeThe recipe says only to cut the grains from the cobs, but it is worth scraping the cobs afterwards with the back of the knife. The starchy "milk" from the cob is what thickens this; without it the dish stays loose.
- The butterA quarter cup stirred in, plus more dotted on top, reads as a great deal by current habit. Two tablespoons total is enough if you prefer, though the full amount is what gives it the flavour of its period.
- Corn has changedThe sweet corn on sale now is far sweeter and more tender than the varieties Mrs. Fryer's readers cut from the cob. Expect a sweeter, softer result, and season the salt a little more firmly to balance it.
- Holding itLong, slow cooling in an insulated box is not a safe way to keep a milk-and-vegetable dish warm for any length of time. Serve it promptly and refrigerate leftovers rather than leaving it to sit in its own residual heat.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American household manuals between about 1905 and 1920, promoted as a way to save fuel and to keep a summer kitchen cool: you fired the range once, heated your radiants, packed the box, and left the house. Commercial cookers were sold under many brand names, and cookbooks of the period, including loose-leaf collections like this one, often carried a dedicated section of recipes adapted to them, since ordinary directions to "bake until brown" were useless in a vessel that never browned anything. Baked corn itself is much older than the appliance "puddings" of scraped green corn thickened with milk and butter go back to early American cookery and rest on the same trick every corn pudding uses, the starch scraped from the cob doing the work of a flour thickening. The style went out with cheap gas and electricity, though the principle survives in the thermal cooker and, more distantly, in the slow cooker.