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Baked Corn
1 cup cooked corn 1 cup milk cut from cob I beaten egg 1 cup milk I chopped green pepper Salt and pepper Buttered bread-crumbs Cut down rows of kernels with sharp knife and scrape out corn. Mix with egg, milk, salt, pepper, and chopped green pepper (being careful not to put in the seeds). Sprinkle top with crumbs and brown. Serve very hot. (It is cooked in about twenty minutes.) Corn Pudding (from Uncooked Corn) Corn on the cob loses flavor sooner than any vegetable. Do not try to serve it in that way unless perfectly fresh. If any uncooked ears are left over grate them. Six good-sized ears will give one and one-half cups of corn pulp. Add to this one egg beaten very light, one-quarter teaspoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of sugar, one teaspoonful of butter, and one-quarter cup of milk. Butter a quart baking-dish, pour in the mixture, and bake until firm in the center--about twentyfive minutes. Serve at once as a vegetable. raw.
A simple corn custard, thickened only by one egg, so the oven temperature and the depth of the dish decide whether it sets or weeps. Both versions here bake in about the same time.
- Ingredient listThe list as printed appears garbled and repeats the milk; one cup of milk in total suits one cup of corn and one egg. "Cut from cob" seems to attach to the corn, and the scraping in the method yields the starchy liquid sometimes called corn milk rather than more dairy.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. Bake at 350F; the twenty to twenty-five minutes quoted is realistic for a shallow buttered dish holding about a pint of mixture.
- AssemblyThe instruction to sprinkle crumbs and brown omits the step of turning the mixture into a buttered baking dish first. Butter the dish, pour in the corn custard, then crumb the top.
- DonenessA single egg per cup of liquid sets softly. Pull it when the center still trembles slightly and a knife an inch from the edge comes out clean; carried past firm-throughout it will curdle and shed water.
- Green pepper"Green pepper" here means a sweet bell pepper, so the caution about seeds is unlikely to concern heat. Fine dice, and if you want it tender rather than crisp in twenty minutes, soften it in butter first.
- Grating raw earsFor the pudding, grating means pressing the cut ear against a coarse grater or scoring the kernels and scraping with a knife back, so you get pulp and milk rather than whole kernels. Six ears to one and a half cups is a fair estimate; large modern ears may need only four or five.
- Dish size and yieldA quart dish is generous for the pudding's volume, which spreads it thin and speeds setting. Either version serves two to three as a side.
Corn pudding belongs to a long line of American dishes built on the starch and sap of green corn, taken from Native cooking and folded into colonial and later household practice; grated-corn puddings appear in printed American cookbooks through the nineteenth century. What marks this as a left-overs book is the framing: the point is not the pudding but the ear of corn nobody ate at dinner. The author's warning that sweet corn on the cob loses flavor faster than any other vegetable is sound, since the sugars in the kernels convert to starch quickly after picking, a problem largely engineered away by the supersweet varieties bred in the later twentieth century.