Escalloped Corn

Did you know that Chicago is by definition Midwestern?

Escalloped Corn 2 cups canned corn, drained* 1 tbsp butter 2 tbsp flour 1 cup milk 1¼ tsp salt Chili powder, black pepper, paprika, and other seasonings to taste 2 eggs, separated ¼ cup diced ham ½ cup shredded cheddar cheese (mild or sharp, whichever you like) Heat oven to 350°. Grease or spray a medium casserole dish. Melt butter, add flour and mix well. Slowly add the milk, stirring hard as you pour it in. Cook until it comes to a boil, stirring constantly. Reduce heat to medium and cook 2 minutes longer, scraping the pot the whole time. Pour into a large mixing bowl. Mix in corn, seasonings, ham, and egg yolks. Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form, then fold into corn mixture. Pour into the pan. Sprinkle .the cheese on top. Bake until the cheese is golden brown, about 30 minutes. *Use a 16-oz can, or whatever happens to be the closest size on the grocery shelf. All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for your Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for you Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

 

Today, we are revisiting the Dormeyer mixer recipe book. Mom found it at an antique store for 80¢ when I was tiny. I didn't know at the time that old advertising handouts are so common that you can find racks of them for less than the cost of a candy bar. Therefore, I thought it was it was a special compilation of recipes that were all old enough to be heirlooms by now. So it felt like getting a lot of lovingly passed-down recipes without having to get multiple generations of relatives to pass them down. (Because I didn't know about low-quality paper, the book's brittle, browned state made it a rarer treasure.)

Getting to the recipe, today we are making something called "escalloped corn." I guess that tacking an extra "e" onto the word "scalloped" makes it extra fancy? 

This is one of the few recipes that doesn't have any brands in the ingredients. The writers credit "our own Dormeyer kitchens" for the few recipes that didn't come from any food companies. There were no Dormeyer kitchens. They just had their employees send in recipes to round out the book. Given that Illinois has a lot of corn fields once you drive out of Dormeyer's hometown of Chicago, I'm not surprised that we have a corn casserole.

As we soon found out, "escalloping" our corn starts with white sauce.

I'm not going to make any snipes at Midwestern recipes and their apparent aversion to spices. But I will note that I added a truly uncalled-for amount of chili powder.

I know that most casseroles look terrible in the mixing bowl, but this one looked particularly bad.

And now we get to the only reason our escalloped corn is in a mixer instruction book: whipped eggs. I wonder if the Dormeyer people included this recipe subtly promote the extra beaters (sold separately). You can't whip egg whites if you get a single errant drop of yolk in them. Therefore, you have to either pause the recipe to wash the beaters, or get out out a second mixer.

This is a lot of bowls for canned corn.

On a more general note, I really don't think this recipe would exist without mixers. I can't imagine anyone wearing out their wrists to beat egg whites for canned corn, escalloped or not. Even a hand-cranked eggbeater is too much work for canned corn.

Our casserole looked particularly vomitous in the pan. This is why we always cover our casseroles with cheese. (Also, I didn't see the direction to stir the cheese into everything else.)

After seeing how ugly this looked, I was ready to say a lot of mean things about it. Then I tasted a spoonful and instantly stopped regretting that I preheated the oven for this.

But even though I have a dishwasher and multiple electric mixers (they turn up cheap at thrift shops), I didn't like how many dirty dishes were involved in making a casserole. Aren't you supposed to just put everything into a big pan and bake it?

So, when I escalloped some corn again (yes, this was good enough to make again), I reduced our beater count by 50% and dumped the egg yolks into the with everything else. Then I buried the whole mess under seasonings that never made the Dormeyer print edition.

If the goal of this recipe was to achieve greater volume and height, skipping half the steps works better than following the directions. The corn mixture still looks like barf, but now it's extra-fluffy barf.

I liked everything about this recipe except its airiness. Even though it was fully cooked, it had the texture of an uncooked mousse-- with canned corn in it. 

 

But with that said, this tasted really good. I don't think you can go wrong with ham, corn, and cheese. The leftovers were a lot better after firming up in the refrigerator overnight. So even though the Dormeyer people wanted to demonstrate the versatility of electric mixers with corn casserole ("It's not just for cakes!"), this is almost certainly better if you just stir it together and put cheese on top.