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Popcorn Pudding
2 CUPS POPPED CORN I QUART MILK 3 CRACKERS, POUNDED I EGG, BEATEN SALT SUGAR Soak popped corn in milk 3 hours, stir in cracker meal and egg, salt and pepper to taste, and bake 45 minutes.
A plain baked milk-and-egg pudding using popcorn in place of bread or rice. The written method leaves out an oven temperature and contradicts its own ingredient list, so a few decisions have to be made before it goes in the oven.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A milk custard of this kind belongs at 325-350F; hotter and the egg curdles and weeps. Forty-five minutes at 350F is plausible for these quantities; use a dish of at least 1.5 quarts, since a quart of milk plus the corn will nearly fill it.
- Salt, sugar, pepperThe ingredients list salt and sugar; the method asks for salt and pepper. Treat it as a sweet pudding — about 1/4 cup sugar and 1/2 teaspoon salt — unless you want a savoury corn custard, in which case drop the sugar and use the pepper.
- Pounded crackersThis most likely means a plain unsalted soda or water cracker crushed fine, not a seasoned one. Three crackers gives only a small quantity of crumbs -- a few tablespoons; unsalted saltines or matzo crumbs are the closest current match.
- The three-hour soakThis is the hinge. The popcorn has to go completely soft and swollen so the pudding sets as one mass rather than milk with wet styrofoam in it. Use plain popped corn with no butter, oil or salt coating, and refrigerate while it soaks.
- Ratio checkOne quart of milk to a single egg is very lean for a custard. Expect a loose, spoonable pudding rather than a sliceable one; two or three eggs will give it enough body to hold a cut edge.
- DonenessIt is set when a knife inserted an inch from the centre comes out clean and the middle still trembles. A water bath is worth the trouble at this milk-to-egg ratio.
- YieldAbout six servings. Good warm with cream or a spoonful of maple syrup.
Popcorn was a cheap, bulky item in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North American homes, and recipes of exactly this shape appear under names like cracker pudding and bread pudding, all of them variations on the same frugal custard: something swelled in milk, bound with egg and baked.