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Boiled Sweet Corn
Have the water boiling. Remove the husks and silk from the corn and drop them at once into the boiling water; bring water quickly to boiling point and let boil rapidly five to ten minutes (depending somewhat on age of corn). Drain from water and arrange in a napkin-covered platter; serve at once.
A four-line method that still works, with one adjustment: corn bred since 1900 is far sweeter and more tender than what this book's cook was buying.
- Cut the timeFive to ten minutes was reasonable for field corn picked days earlier and already turning starchy. Modern supersweet and sugar-enhanced varieties need 3 to 5 minutes at a rolling boil, less if the kernels are young and milky. Overcooked corn goes tough and loses the sugar to the water.
- Drop it in hot water, not coldThe instruction to have the water boiling first is the hinge of the recipe. Starting corn in cold water gives the kernels a long slow heat that sets the starch and dulls the flavor.
- Don't salt the waterThe original says nothing about seasoning. Cooks have long held that salt in the boiling water firms the kernel skins, though the effect is disputed; salt at the table instead.
- Age of the corn"Depending somewhat on age of corn" could mean hours for a cook with a garden and can mean a week or more in a supermarket. Press a kernel with a thumbnail: if it squirts milk, it is at the short end of the timing; if it dents and stays, give it the full five minutes.
- The napkin platterThis is not decoration. A folded cloth absorbs the drips so the ears do not sit in a puddle and steam themselves further, and it keeps them hot on the way to the table. A clean kitchen towel in a warm serving bowl does the same job.
- QuantityFigure two ears per person as a side dish, three for anyone who counts corn as the point of the meal. Use a wide pot so the ears sit in a single layer and the water returns to the boil fast.
Boiled corn on the cob was one of the dishes European visitors to America found genuinely strange — eating from the cob at table was considered rustic well into the nineteenth century. Before refrigerated rail and, later, home freezing, sweet corn had a window of a few weeks, and cookbooks of this period placed it firmly in the late-summer chapters. The insistence on speed, from field to pot to table, reflects a real chemical problem the writers understood empirically: the sugars in a picked ear convert to starch quickly, and the older advice to have the water boiling before you even walk out to the garden is said to have circulated among farm writers of the era.