Home › Vegetables › Scalloped Corn
Scalloped Corn
1 tablespoon sugar 1 pint fresh corn or drained, canned corn 1 cup bread crumbs 2 tablespoons cream 1½ cup milk Heat the milk in a double boiler. Mix the butter and flour together, and add the hot milk, stirring constantly. Then add the corn, salt and sugar. Let come to the boiling point and turn into a baking dish. Cover the top with the bread crumbs, moistened slightly with cream, and bake 15 to 20 minutes. A tablespoon of butter may be used instead of the cream. 2 eggs
The ingredient list has clearly been scrambled in printing: butter, flour and salt are called for in the method but never listed, and two eggs are listed but never used. Read the method first and treat the list as incomplete.
- The missing white sauceThe method assumes a white sauce, but the amounts were dropped. Somewhere between 1½ and 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour for 1½ cups milk gives a sauce loose enough to bind the corn without turning pasty.
- The two eggsThey appear nowhere in the instructions. Some scalloped corn and corn pudding recipes of the period beat one or two eggs into the slightly cooled sauce to set the dish into a soft custard. If you use them, temper them into the sauce off the heat, after it has stopped boiling, or they will curdle.
- SaltUnquantified. About ¾ teaspoon suits this volume, less if the canned corn is packed with salt.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe names no oven term at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, works. At 15 to 20 minutes the dish is only browning the crumbs and heating through, since the sauce and corn go in already at the boiling point.
- A pint of cornTwo cups of kernels, roughly three or four ears of fresh corn, or a little over one 15-oz can, drained. Fresh corn cut from the cob will give off more liquid and more sweetness than canned.
- The sugarA tablespoon reads oddly now. It was likely aimed at flat-tasting canned corn; with good summer corn, cut it to a teaspoon or leave it out.
- Crumbs and creamTwo tablespoons of cream will not wet a full cup of crumbs evenly. Toss the crumbs with melted butter instead, as the recipe itself offers at the end, and spread them loosely so they crisp rather than mat.
- YieldAbout a 1½-quart dish, serving four to six as a side.
Scalloped dishes take their name from the shell — real or metal — that food was once baked and served in, and by the nineteenth century the word had come to mean anything baked in a dish under a crumb topping, usually bound with milk or a white sauce. Corn was the obvious American candidate: cheap, seasonal in high summer, and increasingly available canned, which is why so many recipes of this period hedge with "fresh corn or drained, canned corn." The tablespoon of sugar is a tell — early commercial canned corn lost much of its sweetness in processing, and cooks compensated.