Home › Vegetables › Corn Pudding
Corn Pudding
6 ears corn. 1 cup hot milk. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1/2 teaspoon sugar 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 egg Prepare the corn as for cooking off the cob. Melt the butter; mix well with the flour; add the milk gradually, then the seasoning and corn, and last of all the beaten egg. Pour into a buttered baking dish and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — the corn, milk and salt are named in the method but never quantified — so treat this as a proportion sketch rather than a fixed formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe loose-leaf page gives only sugar, butter, flour and egg. Working backward from the method, 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour will thicken about 1 cup of milk, and that suits roughly 2 cups of corn kernels; salt is the unnamed "seasoning." These are inferences, not the book's numbers.
- Moderate ovenUsually reckoned about 350F. Half an hour is enough to set a shallow pudding in a buttered dish; a deeper dish will want 40 to 45 minutes, until the center no longer wobbles.
- "As for cooking off the cob"This points to a separate entry elsewhere in the book, so Fryer's own instruction cannot be read off this page. The usual method of the period was scoring down each row with a knife tip and scraping the pulp and milk out with the back of the blade, leaving the tough hulls on the cob. That starchy corn milk is what makes the pudding, and cutting kernels off whole is not the same thing. Two or three large ears give about 2 cups.
- Frozen or canned cornBoth work but neither releases much starch, so the pudding leans on the flour and egg alone. Pulse a third of the kernels in a food processor to fake the scraped pulp. Drain canned corn and cut the salt back.
- Order of operationsThe egg goes in last, after the hot white sauce and corn have been combined. Let the mixture cool briefly first, or add a spoonful of the warm sauce to the beaten egg before combining, so it thickens rather than curdles.
- The sugarHalf a teaspoon is seasoning, not sweetening — it lifts the corn. Modern supersweet varieties are already far sweeter than anything Fryer's readers bought, so it can be left out entirely.
- YieldAbout four side servings in a 1-quart dish. It sets firmer as it cools and reheats well, though it never regains the original loose custard texture.
Corn pudding belongs to the oldest layer of American cookery: a dish built on scraped green corn, the milky immature stage that has to be used within a day or two of picking. Colonial and nineteenth-century cooks scraped their corn, and the technique is often said to derive from Native practice, though the transmission is not documented. What marks this particular version as early twentieth century is the white sauce — butter, flour and milk cooked together — which by Mrs. Fryer's day had become the standard binder taught in cooking schools. Loose-leaf cook books like this one were sold as expandable systems, the pages meant to be rearranged or added to; the format may help explain the clipped, telegraphic ingredient lists and, perhaps, a list that lost several of its lines somewhere along the way.