ISSUE 35, PIES, Part 5: Corn Pie
Corn Pie
Using “green corn,” that is, kernels in the milk stage cut off the cob, or sweet corn at harvest time, corn pie became a standard home dish in the early 19th century, baking corn between two pie crusts. In the twentieth century it became a casserole. Originally there were several standard elements: cut corn, a deep dish, & pie crusts. What you intermixed with the corn depended on what was available in the garden at the time the corn came to milk. There were two approaches: the simple custardy corn pie, and the layered corn pie.
The custardy pie used flour 2 eggs, butter and milk. You would beat the eggs and yolks separately and fold them with milk into the flour and butter, incorporate the cut corn and bake for 20 minutes or so in the oven. The layered pie took longer to cook and was usually deeper in construction. Here is a classic late 19th century Lowcountry corn pie formula: on the bottom of a deep dish lay your crust #1. On it put a layer of cooked rice dotted with bacon, a layer of minced chicken meat, and over that, your corn with seasonings, and repeat the layers until the dish was filled, when you topped it with crust #2.
In the twentieth century cooks often dispensed with the crusts, lining dishes with bacon, building layers of ingredients, including sliced tomatoes, shrimp, and sometimes rice, interspersed with the base corn. In South Carolina there were numbers of controversies: should one include gravy in a chicken corn pie? Should peppers be added to tomato corn pie, and if yes, can hot peppers be included? Should you sweeten the corn with sugar?
The first corn pie recipes come into print in the 1850s. But in the late 18th century an ancestral dish, green corn pudding, came into being, supplying the template for the custard corn pie. In its pristine simplicity it was cut corn baked in milk in a pudding dish lined with corn husks. The earliest newspaper printings of the recipe identified it as New Jersey Green Corn Pudding. [See recipe below. And note that the 1803 Lancaster Hive notes it as a NJ dish—not Pennsylvania Dutch] In 1844 the full custard version of the pudding—with milk, butter, eggs, and flour—appears in the Louisville Journal, and is reprinted extensively, particularly in the South.
The Charleston Courier reprinted it on July 31, 1844. The recipe, a formula that would dominate local thinking on corn pie for a century, appears below.
We can see the movement from the custard pie to the complex corn pie in the recipe contained in the 1855 edition of Sarah Rutledge’s South Carolina Housewife entitled House and Home: in this recipe the corn’s milk replaces cow’s milk, only the yolks of the eggs is employed in the batter, and the juice of 6 to 8 scalded tomatoes is added. No bottom crust is employed and chicken, cold cuts, or shrimp are placed in the center of the pie. No top crust is mentioned in the recipe, and a vegetarian option is discussed in the closing paragraphs of the description. The Carolina Housewife/House and Home, 1854, 74.
The 1920s were the heyday of corn pie in Carolina. The Market Basket column of the Charleston News & Courier held a weekly menu contest, and a high percentage of the winning entries listed corn pie in 1927 and 1928.