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Corn Pudding
2 cups corn. 2 eggs. 1 teaspoon salt. 2 cups milk. 1 tablespoon butter. A little sugar.
Grate corn from ear. Add eggs, melted butter, salt and sugar. Put in baking dish and cook until it thickens and browns.
A plain corn custard, written in the compressed style Mrs. Wilson used throughout the book. The ingredient list and the method do not quite match, so read both before you start.
- The milk is missing from the methodTwo cups of milk are listed but never mentioned again. Beat it in with the eggs and melted butter; without it the mixture is a thick corn mash rather than a pudding.
- Grating the cornGrating rather than cutting is the point: it releases the starchy milk from the kernel, which is what sets the pudding. Split the kernels lengthwise with a knife tip and scrape the cob with the back of the blade, or use the coarse side of a box grater. Roughly four to six ears, depending on size, give about 2 cups.
- Frozen or canned cornFrozen kernels work if you pulse them briefly in a food processor, but they carry less starch and thickening will be weaker. Drain canned corn well and cut the salt, which is already present in the can.
- Oven temperatureMrs. Wilson gives none. Bake at 325-350F. Above that the egg curdles at the edges before the center sets.
- Water bathSet the baking dish in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides. This is a custard by construction, and the gentle heat keeps it smooth.
- Timing and donenessExpect 45 to 60 minutes in a 1 1/2-quart dish. It is done when a knife slid into the center comes out clean and the surface is set with a light brown top; a pudding that still trembles loosely in the middle will weep as it cools.
- "A little sugar"A teaspoon or two is enough with good summer corn. Modern sweet corn varieties are far sweeter than the field and green corn of 1920, so err low.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish.
Corn pudding belongs to the long American tradition of cooking green corn -- sweet corn taken at the milk stage rather than dried for meal -- a practice generally traced to Native American cookery of the eastern woodlands and taken up wholesale by colonial and later households. The grated-corn custard is essentially a way of stretching a brief season: sweet corn was ideally picked and used the same day, and the technique of scraping the cob captures the starch that makes the dish thicken without flour. Mary A. Wilson wrote her cook book in the aftermath of the First World War, and this recipe shows the habits of that work: a handful of cheap ingredients, no fuss, and instructions trimmed so hard that a step went missing.