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Stewed Dried Corn
Soak two cups dried sweet corn overnight, in cold water to cover. In the morning place on range and simmer slowly until corn is tender and water is absorbed, add more water if necessary. Add one-fourth cup butter, two teaspoons sugar, one-fourth cup cream or milk, salt and pepper. Be careful that corn does not scorch.
A straightforward pantry dish from the era before home freezers, when dried sweet corn was a winter staple. The whole thing hinges on patience during the soak and simmer.
- Finding the cornDried sweet corn is not the same as hominy, popcorn or field corn for grinding. Look for oven-dried or roasted sweet corn (the Pennsylvania Dutch style, sometimes sold as Cope's); the roasted kind is darker and tastes faintly of caramel.
- The soak is not optionalTwo cups of dried kernels want a full 8 to 12 hours in cold water to rehydrate evenly. Skip it and you get kernels that soften unevenly, with hard centers that are still chewy by the time the water has cooked away.
- Simmer timeExpect 45 minutes to well over an hour on low heat, depending on how the corn was dried. Keep it barely bubbling and add hot water in small amounts as it goes; the instruction about scorching is the real warning here, since the corn's own sugars catch on the pan bottom the moment the liquid runs low.
- Use a heavy panA thin saucepan will burn this. A heavy-bottomed pot, or a double boiler for the last stretch, gives you margin. Stir up from the bottom, not just around the top.
- "Place on range"A wood or coal range gave gentle, steady bottom heat. On a modern burner that means low, and on an induction hob the lowest setting you have.
- Volume and yieldTwo cups dried swells to roughly four to five cups cooked, enough to serve about six as a side dish. The recipe itself gives no yield.
- Enriching at the endThe butter, sugar and cream go in only after the corn is tender and the water gone, as the recipe directs; keeping the pan at very low heat at that stage helps, since dairy added earlier scorches and the sugar hastens sticking. Two teaspoons of sugar is a seasoning, not a sweetening; taste first, as roasted dried corn is already sweet.
Drying sweet corn on the cob or off it was one of the standard ways of carrying summer into winter in nineteenth-century American households, alongside canning and root-cellaring. Cut from the cob at the milk stage and dried in a slow oven or on racks in the sun, the kernels shrink to hard amber flecks and keep for a year or more. The technique is generally traced to Native American practice and was taken up widely by settler households, becoming particularly associated with Pennsylvania German cooking, where a scorched-dried version is still sold commercially. Its appearance in the March chapter of a book of Sunday dinners is telling: March is the hungry gap, after the stored fresh vegetables have gone soft and before anything new comes in from the garden, and the dried-goods shelf is what is left.