Peach Custard
Equal parts rich sliced peaches, green corn pulp and water. Sweeter to the taste, and bake twenty minutes.
Three lines of text and no oven temperature, no dish size, no yield. The whole thing hangs on what "green corn pulp" means, so start there.
- Green corn pulpNot a canned product. Fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, split down each row of kernels with a knife tip and the pulp scraped out with the back of the blade, leaving the hulls on the cob. Two large ears give roughly a cup.
- "Sweeter to the taste"Almost certainly a printer's slip for sweeten to the taste. With ripe peaches and milky corn, a few tablespoons of sugar per pint of mixture should be enough, though the recipe leaves the amount to the cook.
- It is not a custard in the modern senseThere are no eggs and no cream. The thickening comes entirely from the starch in the corn milk, which sets as it heats. Expect something closer to a soft spoon pudding than to a baked custard.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven term to work from. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern guess for a twenty-minute bake in a shallow dish. In anything deeper than about an inch and a half the starch is unlikely to set in twenty minutes; give it longer and judge by whether the centre has stopped sloshing.
- Equal parts, by volumeRead the measure as cups, not weight. One cup each sliced peaches, corn pulp and water fills a small gratin dish and serves three or four as a side or a plain dessert.
- The water is doing real workThe water -- It looks like padding, but it may simply be there to thin the corn pulp so the dish does not go pasty. Substituting milk would give a richer mixture and probably a denser set, which is a different dish.
- Peach quality"Rich sliced peaches" points to fruit at full ripeness. Underripe fruit will stay firm and sour, since twenty minutes will not soften it.
- SeasonPeaches and milk-stage sweet corn overlap in the same few weeks of late summer, which is when the dish makes most sense. Frozen corn is a poor substitute for the milky pulp the recipe depends on.
Corn pulp scraped from the cob was, by many accounts, one of the most useful thickeners in a Southern kitchen that could not always count on a steady supply of eggs, cream or cornstarch in a box. The same milky scrapings carry corn pudding, fried corn and the older "green corn" cakes, and here they are asked to stand in for a custard base under fruit. Recipes of this period are often this brief; they were written as reminders for people who already knew the method, not as instructions for strangers. The word "green" in green corn means immature rather than dry, the stage growers still call the milk stage, and the recipe belongs to the narrow window when peaches and sweet corn overlap in the same garden.