Corn Pudding
For a delicious corn pudding, allow two dozen young ears, score and scrape out all the pulp and mix with it from one and one and a half to two cupfuls of milk, according to the juiciness of the corn. Stir in two well beaten eggs, two tablespoonfuls of flour, four tablespoonfuls of butter melted, one teaspoonful of sugar and salt and pepper to taste. Pour in a greased earthen dish and bake for two hours in a slow oven.
A scraped-corn custard rather than a cut-kernel casserole, and the difference is the whole dish. The instructions are sound; only the units and the oven need translating.
- Scoring and scrapingRun a knife tip down the center of each row to split the kernels, then scrape with the back of the blade to press out the pulp and milky liquid, leaving the tough hulls on the cob. This is what makes the pudding smooth; cutting kernels off whole gives a different, chunkier dish.
- How much corn that isTwo dozen ears of small early-summer corn yield a good deal of scraped pulp. Modern supermarket ears are considerably larger, so fewer will get you there. Judge by volume, not by count.
- Milk to taste, literallyThe range is deliberate, tied by the recipe to 'the juiciness of the corn' (the printed text reads 'one and one and a half to two cupfuls,' so the lower bound may be one cup or one and a half). Very juicy corn needs the lower amount; older, starchier corn needs the full two cups. The mixture should pour thickly, like a loose pancake batter.
- Slow oven300F. It is a custard, and a hotter oven will curdle the eggs and weep liquid before the starch in the corn has set.
- Earthen dishAny 2-quart ceramic or glass baking dish. Earthenware is what a recipe like this assumed, and it does heat gently and evenly, which still matters here; a thin metal pan is best avoided.
- The two hoursNot padding. At 300F in a deep dish the center needs that long to set. Test with a knife inserted off-center: it should come out clean, with the very middle still slightly trembling.
- The teaspoon of sugarOne teaspoon for the whole pudding is seasoning, not sweetening, and it was written for corn far sweeter in the field than in the pot. With modern supersweet varieties you can leave it out entirely.
- YieldServes 8 as a side dish.
Scraped-corn pudding belongs to the brief weeks when green corn was in and had to be used at once, and its logic is that of a household with a garden rather than a grocer: two dozen ears is what you pick, not what you buy. Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks carry it in two forms, this custard version bound with egg and a plainer batter version thickened only with flour, and both descend from the long practice of scraping unripe maize for gruels and puddings, a technique generally traced to Native cooks. Its appearance here under "Game" may be a matter of placement rather than a culinary judgment, though a corn pudding alongside roast venison or wild duck would have been unremarkable on an autumn table.<br><br>The instruction to season with salt and pepper and only a teaspoon of sugar marks it as a vegetable course, not a dessert; the sweeter corn puddings familiar from later holiday tables are a twentieth-century drift.