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Green Indian Corn, or Maize, to Boil
Take a pint of corn before it is quite ripe, trim away the husks, and boil quickly, until sufficiently cooked, which will be in about half an hour. Drain, serve on a toast, and send to table as a vegetable, with melted butter, in a tureen. A slice of butter, and a little pepper and salt may be added, if liked. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A straightforward Victorian treatment of sweetcorn, written when the vegetable was still a novelty on British tables. One instruction badly needs revising.
- The half hour is the problemThirty minutes will reduce modern sweetcorn to grey mush. Kernels cut from the cob need 3-5 minutes in boiling water; whole cobs need 4-7. The long boil made sense for field varieties picked at the doughy stage, not for today's sugar-enhanced and supersweet cultivars bred to be tender raw.
- "A pint of corn"Ambiguous in the original. Read as a pint measure of cut kernels, which is roughly 10-12 oz, or the yield of three to four medium cobs. The stated yield of three or four people suits that reading.
- "Before it is quite ripe"This means the milk stage, when a pierced kernel spurts white liquid rather than a starchy paste. Most sweetcorn sold fresh today is picked at or before this point, so the caution is largely redundant.
- TrimmingStrip husk and silk. The silk comes away most easily if you pull it downward against the grain of the cob with a dry cloth or a stiff brush.
- Salt in the waterLeave it out or keep it light. Salted water is often said to toughen the kernel skins; more to the point, sugar-rich modern corn needs nothing but plain water.
- Serving on toastA period habit, and the toast will soften quickly under the drained corn. If you keep it, drain the corn thoroughly and use a thick, well-browned slice; otherwise serve the corn alone with the melted butter in its tureen.
- Melted butterIn Victorian usage this often meant the flour-thickened butter sauce rather than plain drawn butter. Either works here; the plain version suits the vegetable better.
Maize reached Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century but was slow to be accepted as a table vegetable in Britain, where it was long regarded as fodder or as famine relief grain. An entry like this reflects the late nineteenth-century period in which American foods were beginning to appear in English household books. The instruction to serve on toast with melted butter looks like a British domestication, applying the familiar treatment for asparagus and other soft vegetables to an unfamiliar one. The recipe's insistence that the corn be taken "before it is quite ripe" marks the distinction between green corn eaten as a vegetable and mature maize dried and ground for meal.