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Green Corn Pudding
Scrape 6 ears of green corn (do not cut off, but open and scrape), beat 2 eggs with 1/2 cup sugar, 1 pint milk, 4 butter crackers rolled fine, a little salt. Put lumps of butter on top before placing in oven. Bake 3/4 to 1 hour. Eat with butter.
— Mrs. John Legg
A plain custard-style corn pudding that depends almost entirely on the corn itself. The original assumes a wood or coal range and gives no temperature, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; cooks of the period judged a wood or coal range by feel rather than by thermometer. A custard pudding of this kind belongs in a moderate oven, around 350F. At that heat the stated 45 minutes to 1 hour suits roughly a 1 1/2-quart dish; the centre should be just set with a slight wobble.
- The scraping is the point"Do not cut off, but open and scrape" is the hinge of the recipe. Slit each row of kernels with a knife tip, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade so you get the starchy pulp and the milk and leave the tough hulls behind. Cutting kernels off whole gives a watery pudding with chewy skins and no body — the scraped starch is what thickens it.
- "Green corn"Nineteenth-century usage for fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, as opposed to dried field corn. Six ears yields roughly 2 cups of scraped pulp. Frozen kernels will not substitute well, since the milk has already been lost.
- Butter crackersA plain, slightly rich cracker of the period, closer to a modern common cracker than to anything sweet. Four rolled fine come to about 1/4 to 1/3 cup of crumbs, which is all the binder this pudding gets besides the eggs.
- SugarHalf a cup with only two eggs and a pint of milk makes a distinctly sweet dish, closer to a dessert pudding than the savoury corn puddings served alongside meat today. If you want it as a side, a quarter cup is plenty; modern supersweet varieties are sweeter than the sweet corn available when this was written.
- Dish and butterButter a 1 1/2-quart baking dish. The lumps of butter dotted on top were doing what a crust would — they melt into a browned skin and keep the surface from drying. Use about a tablespoon.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. "Eat with butter" means at the table, hot, with more butter added to each portion; it is best straight from the oven, as it firms and can weep a little as it cools.
- Why it sits under Fish and MeatFiling is loose in community cookbooks of this era. Treat it as a side dish or a supper dish rather than expecting it to belong with the roasts.
Corn pudding is often said to be one of the clearest inheritances from Native American cooking in the Anglo-American kitchen: the technique of scraping green corn from the cob for its milky starch is traditionally traced to Native practice before European settlement, and colonial cooks appear to have taken it up readily, adding eggs, milk and sugar to make something recognisable as an English baked pudding. Recipes of this shape appear steadily in American household books through the nineteenth century, and the cracker crumbs are a period tell — rolled crackers were the standard cheap binder and thickener in the decades before boxed crumbs and cornstarch were reliably on every shelf. The Philathea Cook Book belongs to a large family of church-society fundraising collections, in which contributors' names were attached to individual recipes; recipes like Mrs. John Legg's were written for cooks who already knew what a moderate oven felt like, which is why the instructions stop where they do.