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Individual Green Corn Pudding
Make tulip-shaped cups of the lower part of the green corn husks, the stem being cut offclose and the top edges cut rounded with a pair of shears. Dip the cups in hot, clear butter. Place them in gem pans of suitable size, fill with the corn pudding preceding and bake in a slow oven from 10 to 15 minutes without burning the husks out of color. When set lift the puddings out of the gem or muffin-pans and serve in the husks hot.
As the green corn season is short, canned corn has to do duty for it most of the year Two cans of the so called two-pound size will make the receding amount. That is if the honest canned corn be used, which is solid and has to be dug out with a spoon. When your house "gets stuck," on the fraudulent corn-and-water put up by the firm that dyes mulberries with logwood, for blackberries, and cans the logwood chips too, then use four cans instead of two; drain it as dry as possible and mash it to a partial paste, to imitate the haved green corn.
This is a presentation method rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you have already mixed the corn pudding batter from the preceding page, and tells you how to bake it in husk cups. A few of the assumptions behind it need translating.
- "Hot, clear butter"Clarified butter — butter melted and the milk solids skimmed or poured off. Clarified butter browns less readily than whole butter, which fits the recipe's warning about burning the husks out of colour, though the book gives no reason for the dip.
- Gem pansNineteenth-century gem pans were commonly cast iron, though tin ones were also sold, and the cups were often deeper and more rounded than a modern tin. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; the husk cup is what holds the shape, the pan only supports it.
- A slow ovenConventionally reckoned at somewhere around 275–325F; the book gives no temperature. The low heat suits the aim of setting a custard-bound pudding without driving the husks past green. Judge doneness by a set, barely-trembling centre as well as by the recipe's stated 10 to 15 minutes.
- Preparing the husksUse the broad inner husks from fresh ears, not the dry outer leaves. Soaking them briefly in hot water makes them pliable enough to shape without splitting, and they hold a tulip flare better once buttered.
- Green cornSweet corn cut at the milk stage — kernels that spurt when scored with a knife. "Shaved" green corn means the kernels cut from the cob, usually with the cob then scraped to release the starchy milk, which is what gives the pudding body.
- The canned corn substitutionA "two-pound" can of the period held roughly 20 ounces net. Modern canned whole-kernel corn runs about 15 ounces and is packed in considerably more liquid, so the author's advice for the watery grade applies: drain hard, then pulse or mash part of it to a coarse paste to mimic scraped cob milk. Canned cream-style corn is closer still in texture.
- Yield and servingTwo of the old cans make up the quantity called for by the preceding pudding; the recipe gives no yield in portions. They must go to the table hot and in their husks; the husk is the dish, and it stiffens and dulls as it cools.
"Green corn" is the old American term for sweet corn eaten fresh at the milk stage, as opposed to field corn dried for meal, and green corn pudding — a baked custard of scraped kernels, eggs, milk and butter — is a long-established American dish. Serving it back inside a shaped husk is an individual-portion presentation of the kind found in late-nineteenth-century professional manuals. The sour aside about corn-and-water and mulberries dyed with logwood belongs to the decades before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, when adulteration and short-weight packing were live commercial grievances, and logwood was a genuine and widely condemned colouring agent in cheap preserves.