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Deviled Corn
2 tablespoons butter or savory 2 cups corn pulp (fresh or fat canned)
2 tablespoons flour
1 egg
1½ cups milk
1 tablespoon Worcestershire
1 teaspoon salt sauce
¼ teaspoon mustard
Crums
Paprika
Make a sauce of the fat, flour and seasonings, add corn, egg slightly beaten, and Worcestershire sauce. Pour into a bakingdish, cover with crums mixed with a little butter or butter substitute and bake until crums are brown.
A white-sauce corn pudding from the wartime-thrift era, when "deviled" meant little more than mustard and Worcestershire. The printed ingredient column has been scrambled by the original two-column typesetting; read it before you shop.
- Untangling the ingredient listThe columns ran together in the original. The list is: 2 tablespoons butter or savory fat; 2 tablespoons flour; 1½ cups milk; ¼ teaspoon mustard; 2 cups corn pulp (fresh or canned); 1 egg; 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce; 1 teaspoon salt; crumbs; paprika. The paprika is a finishing dust and is never mentioned again in the method.
- Corn pulpThis means kernels scraped and pressed from the cob so the milky interior comes out and the tough hulls stay behind — run a knife down the center of each row, then scrape with the back of the blade. Canned cream-style corn is the closest shortcut; two cups is roughly one 15-oz can plus a little more.
- "Crums"Dry breadcrumbs are the likelier reading; they brown more reliably than soft fresh ones. Figure ½ to ¾ cup tossed with a tablespoon of melted butter.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. 350°F for 30 to 40 minutes suits it: long enough for the egg to set through, short enough that the sauce does not break. If the crumbs are pale at the end, a minute or two under the broiler finishes them.
- The hingeLet the white sauce cool for a few minutes before the beaten egg goes in, and stir the egg in off the heat. Added to a sauce still near the boil it curdles at once and the pudding bakes grainy.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons each of fat and flour to 1½ cups milk gives a thin sauce on purpose — the corn and egg thicken it further. Cook the roux a full minute before the milk to lose the raw-flour taste.
- SeasoningDry mustard is probably what is meant here rather than prepared. If your corn is canned, taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt.
- YieldAbout a quart of mixture — a 1½-quart baking dish, serving four to six as a side. Let it stand five minutes out of the oven so it slices rather than slumps.
"Deviled" in American cookery of this period meant nothing more elaborate than mustard, cayenne or paprika, and a bottled sauce — the same logic that produced deviled eggs, deviled ham and deviled crab. Butterick was a pattern-and-magazine publisher, and its cookbooks were pitched broadly at middle-class households. The "butter or butter substitute" and "savory fat" language belongs to the years around and after the First World War, when butter and lard were costly and scarce and oleomargarine and rendered drippings were openly recommended in print; butter was not formally rationed in the United States during that war. Scraping corn to separate the milky interior from the hulls turns up often in cookbooks of the period, when sweet corn was seasonal.