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Tuscarora Pudding
A "vegetable entree" or entremet. 3 pounds of green corn. 6 ounces of fresh butter. 1 rounded teaspoonful of salt. 1/2 teaspoonful of white pepper. 2 eggs and 8 yolks, (or 6 eggs.) 1 quart of milk.
Use tender roasting-ears. Free them carefully from silk. Shave the corn from the cob with a sharp knife till you have the required amount--nearly two quarts. Melt the butter and stir it in, and the seasonings. Beat the eggs and milk together; mix all; bake in a four quart milk pan about half an hour or till just set in the middle.
A baked corn custard, wide and shallow rather than deep, meant to come to table as a vegetable course. The proportions are generous with butter and yolks; the technique is straightforward custard work.
- No oven temperature is givenTreat it as a custard: 325-350F. Higher heat curdles the eggs and weeps water into the corn.
- "Green corn"Fresh sweet corn in the milk stage, not dried field corn and not anything green in colour. Three pounds of cut kernels (the recipe's "nearly two quarts") is roughly 10 to 12 large ears; modern supersweet varieties are sweeter than the corn Whitehead knew, so the pudding will taste more dessert-like.
- Scrape the cobsThe recipe says only to shave the kernels, but running the back of the knife down each cob presses out the starchy "milk." That liquid adds body to the pudding, though the eggs are what set it.
- A four-quart milk panA wide, shallow pan, not a deep casserole. A large gratin dish or roasting pan gives the same shallow depth, which is what allows a half-hour bake; note that the mixture nearly fills four quarts, so a 9x13 dish will be brim-full.
- EggsNineteenth-century eggs are generally reckoned to have run smaller than today's large. Two whole eggs plus eight yolks, or six whole, is a rich custard ratio; use large eggs and expect a firm set.
- Judging doneness"Just set in the middle" means the centre still trembles slightly when the pan is nudged; an instant-read thermometer at 170-175F is the reliable check. Carryover heat finishes it. Half an hour is realistic for a shallow pan but check at 25 minutes.
- A water bath helpsIn a modern oven with dry radiant heat, setting the pan in a larger tray of hot water keeps the edges from setting hard before the middle sets at all.
- YieldOver three quarts of mixture, hence the four-quart pan; serves 12 to 16 as a side dish. It is best warm; reheated, it firms and dries.
Jessup Whitehead's The American Pastry Cook was written for hotel and restaurant kitchens in the 1890s, which is why a corn custard is filed under "vegetable entree or entremet" — the course served between heavier dishes on a long menu. The name nods to the Tuscarora, an Iroquoian people who moved north from Carolina to New York in the early eighteenth century; their name attached to a number of American foodstuffs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including "Tuscarora rice" for wild rice. The attribution here looks like a gesture rather than a documented lineage: green corn puddings of this type, thickened by the corn's own starch and set with egg, are recorded across the eastern United States long before Whitehead, and corn in the milk stage was long used in Native cooking. What the recipe shows about its period is the confidence of the hotel kitchen in dressing a farmhouse dish in eight egg yolks and half a pound of butter.