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Green Corn Pudding
Draw a sharp knife through each row of corn lengthwise, ther scrape out the pulp; to one pint of the corn add one quart of milk, three eggs, a little suet, sugar to taste, and a few lumps of butter stir it occasionally until thick, and bake about two hours.
A custard pudding built on scraped corn, from the days when sweet corn came off the cob in high summer and had to be used the same day. The original assumes a wood range and a cook who checked on things; a few numbers make it repeatable.
- The scraping is the pointSplitting each row of kernels lengthwise with a knife tip, then scraping with the back of the blade, releases the milky pulp and leaves the tough hulls on the cob. Cutting whole kernels off instead gives a pudding full of skins and no body — the starch in that pulp is what thickens the custard.
- How much cornA pint of scraped pulp is roughly 6 to 8 ears of sweet corn, depending on size. Measure the pulp, not the ears.
- Modern corn is sweeterSupersweet hybrids carry far more sugar than the field and heirloom sweet corns of the 1880s. Start with a tablespoon or two of sugar and taste the raw batter rather than sweetening to a nineteenth-century palate.
- Suet"A little suet" means finely chopped beef kidney fat; an ounce or so is a reasonable reading of "a little". If you want the richness without the graininess, an extra tablespoon of butter does much the same work.
- Stir occasionally until thickThe recipe does not say where the thickening happens. The safest modern reading is stovetop, before baking: warm the milk, corn and butter gently and stir until slightly thickened, then temper in the beaten eggs off the heat, since adding eggs straight into a hot pan will scramble them.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no temperature; two hours of baking implies a gentle heat, and around 300 to 325F is a reasonable modern equivalent. Bake in a buttered 2-quart dish, ideally set in a pan of hot water, until the centre is just set with a slight wobble. A modern oven may get there well before two hours, so start checking at an hour.
- ConsistencyWith a quart of milk to a pint of corn and only three eggs, this is a loose, spoonable custard rather than a sliceable cornbread-style pudding. If you want it firmer, use three cups of milk or a fourth egg.
- YieldServes six to eight as a side dish. Despite the sugar, it reads as an accompaniment to meat rather than a dessert.
"Green corn" is the old American term for sweet corn eaten fresh and immature, as against the dried field corn that became meal and hominy — a distinction that mattered in a household economy where a great deal of corn was stored rather than eaten off the cob. Corn pudding is generally traced to Native American practice adopted early by colonial cooks, and by the late nineteenth century it was familiar summer fare in the South and the mid-Atlantic. The sugar and eggs notwithstanding, this reads as a dish to put beside ham or fried chicken. The scraping method appears in a range of nineteenth-century cookbooks and persisted into the twentieth century.