Corn Pudding Recipe

Rising up in Pennsylvania Dutch nation, corn was at all times in common rotation round our household desk. The area’s wealthy agricultural historical past of rising and preserving the crop meant that there was at all times loads of corn round, irrespective of the time of yr. Whereas indigenous folks in what ultimately grew to become the Americas had lengthy been rising corn and incorporating it into their cuisines, the Pennsylvania Dutch custom of cooking with corn dates again to the seventeenth and 18th centuries, when German immigrants arrived in America. They sought to meld their culinary customs with the brand new substances out there to them, leading to what has now turn out to be Pennsylvania Dutch delicacies. 

Corn shortly grew to become a part of the Pennsylvania Dutch food regimen, and plenty of cookbooks and magazines from the nineteenth century, together with Phebe Earle Gibbons’ 1872 e-book Pennsylvania Dutch and Alice Morse Earle’s 1898 House Life in Colonial Days, include directions for getting ready corn, with the ingredient showing in dishes like Johnny truffles, scrapple, dumplings, and corn pudding. 

Because the late Edna Eby Heller wrote in her 1960 e-book The Dutch Cookbook, “There are extra [Pennsylvania] Dutch methods of serving corn than some other vegetable, excepting potatoes.” If my childhood was any indication, she’s actually not mistaken. There was hen corn soup on busy weeknights, garden-fresh corn as a summertime facet, and throughout the holidays, a household favourite: baked corn pudding. With loads of eggs, butter, milk, sugar, and generally cornstarch or flour, the dish is gentle and creamy and balances the corn’s pure sweetness with simply sufficient salt and pepper to make it a savory facet.

Although corn pudding seems in lots of regional American cuisines—spicy inexperienced chile-inflected pudding within the Southwest, Southern spoonbread and casserole, and molasses-sweetened pudding in New England—they sometimes function canned, creamed, or recent corn. The model I grew up consuming is historically ready with dried corn, as drying corn and different homegrown produce was as soon as such an vital a part of Pennsylvania farming tradition that some properties had been constructed with dry houses, small buildings with cabinets and drawers particularly designed for drying vegatables and fruits. 

Nan Greatest, a household pal who grew up within the city of Brownstown in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, remembers her grandmother painstakingly eradicating the kernels from cobs of corn and spreading them onto trays that match into a tool her grandfather constructed to warmth and dry corn. The method took a number of days, she recollects, and stuffed her residence with a toasty aroma because the corn turned from vibrant yellow to deep golden brown. Greatest’s reminiscences are echoed by many different Pennsylvania Dutch cooks. “The operation was one thing of a culinary ritual,” writes Betty Groff in her Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook. “Because the corn dried on the range within the nook of the farm kitchen, [family members] took turns staying awake all evening to verify it didn’t burn.”

 One firm, Cope’s, has bought dried candy corn to Pennsylvanians for over 100 years, harvesting younger corn and preserving it for a nutrient-dense dried corn; which the corporate describes as having a “golden shade and toasted candy corn taste.” Cope’s is the model Pennsylvanians flip to after they want dried corn, and a few classic Pennsylvania Dutch cookbooks even embody an handle so residence cooks—within the pre-internet age—might order baggage of the signature dried corn by mail.

A Contemporary Twist on Pennsylvania Dutch Corn Pudding

To make corn pudding the standard Pennsylvania Dutch means, residence cooks soak finely floor dried corn in milk in a single day to rehydrate it. Whereas that technique produces a scrumptious, flavorful dish, it’s a multi-day affair that merely isn’t life like for most individuals. Though Pennsylvania grocery shops do carry dried corn sometimes, particularly round fall and winter holidays, the type wanted to arrange this pudding the standard means isn’t simple to supply should you dwell elsewhere on the planet. In Britain, the place I now dwell, a seek for dried corn led me to popping corn, freeze-dried corn, and loads of hen feed—however nothing appropriate for making corn pudding. 

With that in thoughts, I name for recent corn in my recipe beneath, making this a corn pudding that takes only one hour to arrange and is far simpler to buy. I’m not veering too removed from custom, as Pennsylvania Dutch puddings do incorporate recent corn when seasonally out there. (Considered one of my classic cookbooks consists of choices for puddings made with canned corn, dried corn, or recent corn—three barely totally different approaches to the identical dish.) This model is much like the one my household prepares: candy and custardy, with a consistency that falls someplace between pudding and quiche. 

Except for the meals processor, this corn pudding is virtually a one-bowl recipe that takes 10 minutes to whip up earlier than you place it within the oven to bake. Although it’s barely totally different from the dried corn pudding recipe that Nan shared with me, it’s no much less scrumptious. When recent corn comes into season, that is at all times one of many first issues I make.