Issue #69: Skillet Corn Pudding
Where to Find Good Recipes on the Internet, the Love Child of Quiche and Cornbread
Today is officially the last day of summer. I’m trying to hold on, cooking and eating as much local produce as I can. But the shorter days, cooler nights, and my busier schedule won’t let me deny autumn has arrived for much longer. This week on What’s Burning you’ll enjoy my interview with Carolyn Steel, a British architect turned food philosopher, who has such a radical proposal for the effective organization of society around food that she had to coin a new word for it, sitopia. Paradoxically, organizing our cities, our lives around food is, of course, a very old idea—one I’ve been practicing myself for a while. Carolyn is one of my favorite people to talk to, full of warmth, inspiration, and insight. You won’t want to miss this episode.
People ask me all the time how I know a good recipe when I see one. Even after decades of writing, reading, and cooking from recipes, it’s still not always easy to tell. The best way to assure success with a recipe is to know and trust your source, which the Internet has made harder and which Instagram and TikTok, in particular, have made near impossible. What goes viral on these media has less to do with the accuracy of recipes and more to do with entertainment and shock value. (I mean, people are cooking chicken in NyQuil, FFS!) It must be said that before the Internet became the world’s recipe box, many recipes published in cookbooks didn’t work, either. But you didn’t have to buy those books. My IG feed is full of cooks I don’t know making recipes I don’t want.
My go-to websites for recipes are seriouseats.com, Food52.com, and thewoksoflife.com, the last mostly for Chinese and other Asian dishes. There are plenty of other sites where I find great recipes, too. But these three are my first stop because they consistently deliver recipes that work, producing delicious dishes without too much fuss that align with my tastes. Of course, I often mess with their recipes, anyway, which I can do in part because the base recipes themselves work so well. Today’s topic is a case in point.
It was on seriouseats.com that I found a recipe for called “Sweet and Savory Corn Casserole” by Stella Parks, one of their baking experts, whose recipes always deliver. There was something about this one-skillet, cheesy, corn creation that caught my attention, even if I didn’t love the name. Come August up at the lake, I am always looking for ways to consume more of the delicious local corn and seasonal produce. And Nate usually approves of anything covered in melted cheese, even vegetables.
I’ve used this recipe as a starting point many times since, always including corn, but adapting it to whatever other vegetables we have around, including zucchini, summer squash and squash blossoms, Swiss chard leaves and/or stems, ripe tomatoes and green tomatoes, all kinds of peppers, root vegetables, winter squash, sweet potatoes, and more. By changing up the combination of vegetables and herbs, this skillet vegetable pudding—a sort of offspring between cornbread and quiche—that transitions from late summer (zucchini and basil) to fall (celery root, butternut squash, and sage).
In addition to being adaptable to many different vegetables, this skillet corn pudding can also can play a number of different roles during a meal. I’ve served it as a side dish for a barbecue feast or as a main dish for lunch. Slice it, fry it in butter or olive oil, and put a poached egg on top and its perfect for breakfast, too.
RECIPE: Skillet Corn and Vegetable Pudding
(Makes one 10-inch pudding, enough for 6 to 8 people. But the recipe can be easily cut in half and baked in an 8-inch skillet, for 4)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 large onion, white or red, diced (about 1 ¼ cups)
1 small red or green pepper, sweet or spicy, diced (about 3/4 cup)
1 to 2 cups seasonal vegetables, such as zucchini, yellow squash, Swiss chard leaves and/or stems, kolrhabi, green tomatoes, additional peppers, celeriac, mushrooms, or butternut squash, cleaned, peeled, if appropriate, and cut into small dice
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon sugar
Handful of chopped fresh herbs, such as basil, thyme, marjoram, or sage
1 teaspoon sweet or smoked paprika
1/8 teaspoon cayenne
Kernels from 3 large fresh ears corn (about 3 cups)
1/2 cup cornmeal
3 large eggs
1 1/4 cups milk or buttermilk
1/2 cup heavy cream, yogurt, or additional milk
Pinch freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup finely shredded cheese, hard, sharp cheese, such as cheddar, Gruyère, Comté, Gouda, or similar
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Melt the butter in a 10-inch cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion, pepper, and other vegetables, and salt, and sauté, stirring frequently, until the onions are soft and they are beginning to brown, about 10 minutes. Add the sugar, sage, salt, paprika, and cayenne, and cook another 3 or 4 minutes to bring out the flavor of the spices. Add the corn kernels. Continue cooking, stirring frequently, until no water remains in the skillet, another 8 minutes or so, longer if using zucchini or mushrooms, which have a lot of water in them. Stir in the cornmeal and remove from heat.
In a small bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, cream or more milk, and nutmeg, then pour this into the corn mixture. Using a rubber spatula, stir well to combine. Sprinkle with the grated cheese, and bake until set, about 20 minutes. Turn on the broiler and broil only until the melted cheese is lightly browned, a minute or two more. Serve warm.