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Corn Souffle
1 tablespoon butter or savory fat 1 tablespoon flour 1/2 cup milk 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon paprika Pepper 1 pimiento 2 cups corn pulp (fresh or canned) 2 eggs Make a white sauce, using the fat, flour, milk and seasoning. Rub the pimiento through a sieve and add it to the sauce. Add the corn to the mixture. Cool slightly, then add the well-beaten egg-yolks and fold in the stiffly beaten egg-whites. Turn into a greased baking-dish, set the dish in a pan of hot water, and bake in a moderate oven until the egg is set, about thirty minutes.
A small, plain soufflé of the boiled-custard school: a stiff white sauce carries the corn, and the beaten whites do the lifting. It is baked in a water bath, so it sets gently and will not collapse the instant it leaves the oven.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe white sauce with corn is heavy, so slacken it first with the yolks and a spoonful of the beaten whites before folding in the rest. Work with a wide spatula and stop while streaks of white are still visible; over-mixing at this stage is the quickest way to lose the lift.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. Thirty minutes is right for a dish about 1 to 1 1/2 quarts; the centre should be just barely firm and no longer wet when a knife is drawn through it.
- The water bathUse hot, not boiling, water and bring it about halfway up the sides of the baking dish. Pour it into the pan after the pan is on the oven rack, or you will slosh water into the soufflé.
- Corn pulpThis means kernels scraped and pressed from the cob so the hulls stay behind, or canned cream-style corn. Whole frozen or canned kernels will work but give a chunkier, less souffléd result; pulse them briefly first.
- Savory fatPeriod shorthand for rendered bacon or ham drippings, or beef or poultry fat kept in a crock. Bacon fat suits corn particularly well; butter is the neutral choice.
- PimientoA sweet red pepper, sold in small cans or jars, already roasted and skinned. One pimiento gives roughly 2 tablespoons once sieved. A jarred roasted red pepper, drained and pushed through a sieve, does the same job.
- SaltThe teaspoon seasons the whole dish, not just the half cup of milk, but it is still on the heavy side by current taste, especially with canned corn that is already salted. Start with half and correct the sauce before the eggs go in.
- YieldServes four as a side dish, or two or three as a light supper with a salad. Serve it straight from the oven; like all soufflés it sinks as it cools, though the water bath makes the fall a gentle one.
Corn "souffles" and puddings of this kind filled the vegetable chapters of American cookbooks from the 1880s onward, and they owe as much to the thrift of the white-sauce habit as to French pastry. A single tablespoon each of fat and flour turns half a cup of milk into a binder stiff enough to hold two cups of corn, and two eggs stretch a summer glut of sweet corn — or a winter can of it — into a dish that could be brought to the table on its own. The pimiento is a mark of the period: canned Spanish sweet peppers became widely available in the United States in the early twentieth century and were used freely, as here, wherever a cook wanted a spot of red in a pale dish. The New Delineator Recipes came out of the Butterick publishing house, whose magazine readers were the target audience for exactly this sort of economical, presentable vegetable course.