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Corn Pudding
2 cups popped corn, finely pounded 3 cups milk 3 eggs, slightly beaten 1/2 cup brown sugar 1 tablespoon butter ¾ teaspoon salt Scald milk, pour over corn, and let stand one hour. Add remaining ingredients, turn into a buttered dish, and bake in a slow oven until firm. Serve with cream, or maple syrup.
A custard built on pounded popcorn rather than cornmeal — the popped corn swells in scalded milk into something between a bread pudding and a baked custard. It is a gentle-oven dish and will curdle if pushed.
- Slow ovenRead "slow oven" as 300–325F. The mixture is a milk-and-egg custard; above about 350F the eggs tighten and weep. Expect 50 to 70 minutes, until the centre barely trembles and a knife an inch from the edge comes out clean.
- Water bathThe original does not call for one, but setting the buttered dish in a pan of hot water gives a smoother set and guards against the edges overcooking before the middle firms.
- Popped corn, poundedTwo cups of popped corn is a small amount by volume — roughly a tablespoon of unpopped kernels. Use plain air-popped corn with no butter, oil, salt or sweet coating. Pound or pulse it to coarse crumbs; a food processor does in seconds what a mortar did in minutes.
- The hour of soakingDo not shorten it. The crushed corn has to absorb the scalded milk and go soft, or the finished pudding is gritty and specked with tough hulls.
- Salt quantityThe salt measure in this printing is unclear. Three-quarters of a teaspoon suits the volume of milk and sugar here; anything above a teaspoon will read as salty against the brown sugar.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugars varied a good deal in colour and moisture, so the intended shade is uncertain. Dark brown or muscovado will dominate the mild corn flavour, so use light brown and pack it loosely.
- YieldFills a 1 1/2-quart baking dish and serves six. Serve warm rather than hot, with cream or maple syrup as directed — it is thin-textured and better spooned than sliced.
Corn puddings in nineteenth-century American cookbooks usually meant cornmeal or fresh scraped green corn; using popped corn instead is unusual. Popcorn was popped domestically over fires and in kettles well before it became a familiar commercial commodity sold at fairs and street stands. Serving with maple syrup suggests a northeastern kitchen.