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Boiled Corn
Put the well-cleaned ears in salted boiling water, boil an hour, or boil in the husk for the same time, remove husks and serve immediately. Corn thoroughly cooked is a wholesome dish.
The method is sound; the timing belongs to another century of corn. Everything else here is about closing that gap.
- The hour is the problemModern sweet corn needs 3 to 5 minutes in boiling water, or up to 7 if the ears are large and a few days old. An hour turns the kernels to mush and drives out what sugar remains.
- Why the original says an hourNineteenth-century table corn was closer to a field variety, often picked at a starchier stage and days from the garden, and period cookbooks generally call for long boiling. Today's sugary-enhanced and supersweet hybrids are bred to be tender and sweet raw.
- Salt in the waterSalting is fine, though some cooks hold that it toughens the skins. Hard water is also blamed for tough skins, and a spoonful of sugar or a splash of milk in the pot is the traditional counter.
- Boiling in the huskStill a good method, and it steams the kernels rather than leaching them. Allow 8 to 10 minutes for ears left in the husk, then strip the husk and silk while hot, using a towel.
- Serve immediatelyThe one instruction to keep exactly as written. Corn held in hot water past a few minutes goes flat and waterlogged; drain and take it to the table at once.
- YieldReckon one to two ears per person. A large stockpot handles six to eight ears without crowding; more than that and the water takes too long to recover its boil.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, in the middle of the corn belt, and its brevity here tells you how ordinary the dish was — nobody in that readership needed to be told what corn on the cob was. The line "corn thoroughly cooked is a wholesome dish" is doing quiet work: green corn had a longstanding reputation as hard on the digestion, a worry nineteenth-century domestic writers seem often to have met with more cooking rather than less. Sweet corn was still a relatively recent garden crop in general American use, and because its sugars turn to starch within hours of picking, the household ideal was to have the pot already boiling before the ears left the stalk — advice often said to recur in kitchen books of the period, and still the best thing anyone has said about corn.