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Corn, Baked
For this dish allow one can of corn, one-half cup of milk, one-half teaspoon of salt and two teaspoons of butter. Place these ingredients in a baking-dish, cutting the butter into small pieces. If the corn is very dry, more milk will be required, as the mixture should be rather thin before baking. Cook forty minutes.
A plain scalloped-style corn without crumbs or eggs, written for cooks who kept canned corn in the pantry as a matter of course. The original gives no oven temperature, which is the one thing you need to supply.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven heat and no oven term at all; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a sensible modern assumption. Forty minutes at that heat sets the milk and concentrates the corn; hotter and the milk will catch at the edges before the centre is hot.
- The canA modern can of corn runs about 15-16 oz; period cans were not necessarily the same size, so treat the quantity as approximate. Use the whole can, liquid included, since the recipe wants the mixture rather thin before baking; only drain if you are adding the extra milk it mentions.
- Sweetness has shiftedEarly canned corn came from starchier sweet-corn varieties; modern supersweet types are noticeably sweeter and softer. You may find half a teaspoon of salt low for current tastes — season and taste before it goes in the dish.
- ButterTwo teaspoons is about a third of an ounce, dotted over the top rather than stirred in. It melts down and browns the surface; more butter makes a richer dish but also a greasier one, since there are no crumbs or egg to bind it.
- Depth of dishA shallow dish of roughly 1-quart capacity suits the volume; the recipe does not say whether to cover it, and leaving it uncovered lets the mixture reduce over forty minutes. Piled deep in a small dish it is likelier to stay soupy.
- YieldServes three to four as a side. Doubling is straightforward but will need extra time in the oven.
The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, from the pattern company whose magazines had been steering American households for decades, at a time when commercial canning had thoroughly reshaped the ordinary kitchen. Sweet corn was one of the earliest American vegetables to be canned successfully on a large scale, and by the turn of the century a can of corn was among the cheapest and most reliable things in a city pantry, available in February as readily as in August. That context explains the bareness of this recipe: no crumb topping, no eggs, no green pepper, nothing but corn, milk, salt and butter left in a moderate oven while the cook attended to the rest of the meal.