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Nantucket Corn Pudding
12 ears corn cut from cob and put through meat grinder. Add to corn: -4 eggs well beaten, 1/2 cup sugar (very scant), 1 qt. milk, pinch of salt, butter size of English walnut. (If made with canned corn, omit sugar. 1 can corn equivalent to 1 doz. ears.) Put in greased baking dish and while baking stir three or four times to keep from settling. When it has been in oven 15 minutes, stir every 15 minutes after that, until done. Bake 1 hour or until a good brown. Oven should be rather slow.
— Mrs. Lavinia C. Carpenter
A plain custard-set corn pudding of the New England kind, thickened by nothing but eggs and the starch of the corn itself. The repeated stirring is the whole technique.
- Oven temperature"Rather slow" means 300-325F. A custard this thin will curdle and weep if pushed hotter, and the browning at the end comes from the long bake rather than from heat.
- Why you stirGround corn is heavier than the milk and egg around it and sinks into a dense layer on the bottom. Stirring at 15, 30 and 45 minutes redistributes it; after the last stir the pudding is left alone to set and brown.
- Butter size of an English walnutAbout 1 to 2 tablespoons; period equivalences for a walnut-sized lump vary.
- Grinding the cornA meat grinder tears the kernels open and releases the milky starch. A few pulses in a food processor does the same; a blender turns it to soup and the pudding loses its texture.
- Twelve earsSix to nine cups of cut kernels, depending on the size of the ears. Modern supersweet varieties are considerably sweeter than the sweet corn of the period, so treat the half cup of sugar as optional even with fresh ears.
- Canned corn substitutionThe recipe does not say what size can; a No. 2 can (about 20 oz) was a common size, though that is a good deal less corn than a dozen ears. Cream-style corn will make the pudding sweeter and softer; whole-kernel canned corn drained and pulsed is closer to the intent.
- DonenessAn hour at 300-325F in a shallow dish; a deep dish may want 15-20 minutes more. It is done when a knife slid into the center comes out clean of liquid custard, with a browned top.
- YieldWith a quart of milk, four eggs and the corn, this needs a dish of at least 2 1/2 to 3 quarts, and serves eight to ten as a side.
Corn puddings run through New England cookery from the colonial period on, and the Nantucket attachment here is as much a matter of family provenance as of any distinct island method — community cookbooks of this era are often said to have named dishes for the place a contributor's people came from. What marks this version is the grinder: pressing kernels through a meat grinder, or scoring and scraping them with a knife blade, was by most accounts a common way to get the starchy "milk" out of the cob before food processors, and that starch is what lets four eggs and a quart of milk set into a pudding at all. Its placement under "Fish and Meat Dishes" rather than among desserts is a reminder that the sugar here is seasoning, not sweetening — and the instruction to omit it entirely with canned corn suggests the packers were already sweetening their product by the time this book was compiled.