Home › Vegetables › Broiled Green Corn
Broiled Green Corn
Split the cobs; brush with melted butter and lay on a broiler. Broil for eight minutes until cooked; dust with salt; arrange in napkin, and serve.
A four-line method that assumes a coal fire and a hinged gridiron. The technique still works over gas, charcoal or an overhead broiler, provided the corn is fresh and the heat is moderate enough that the butter does not simply scorch.
- "Broiler" means a gridironIn this period a broiler was a wire or iron rack set over live coals, not the top element of an oven. A grill pan or an outdoor grill is the closer equivalent; under an oven broiler, keep the rack about 4 inches from the element and turn the pieces once.
- Split the cobsPresumably husked and silked, then cut lengthwise in half so the kernels lie flat against the heat; the text says only "split." Halving a full ear crosswise instead gives you pieces that roll and cook unevenly.
- Eight minutes is right for young cornThe recipe says eight minutes "until cooked," though sweet corn at the milk stage is edible raw and much of the effect is colour and flavour. Eight to ten minutes over moderate heat browns the kernels without drying them. Older, starchier corn wants a lower heat and a few minutes more.
- Salt at the endThe recipe dusts with salt after cooking rather than before. Whether the order was intentional is not stated.
- Arrange in napkinA folded napkin, corn piled inside; the practice kept such dishes hot. Serve immediately.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon one full ear, split, per person as a side dish, or two for a course on its own.
Green corn meant fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, as against the field corn dried for meal, and the distinction was common enough in nineteenth-century American cookbooks to be part of the name. Sweet corn was little used in European cookery of the period, and its brief season made it a feature of summer eating in the United States. Compendium volumes of this sort often give corn several treatments in a row -- boiled, stewed, in fritters and, as here, broiled -- and the broiled version is the simplest of them. Serving vegetables folded into a napkin was a recognised way of sending them to table hot and dry.