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Roasted Corn
Husk the corn and carefully remove the silk. Brush each ear with melted butter, and dust with salt and pepper. Line a baking dish with paper, place the ears on it, and put in a very quick oven ten or fifteen minutes to brown. Serve on a napkin.
A short, oven-only treatment of sweet corn that predates the backyard grill as a summer default. Two things carry it: a genuinely hot oven and corn young enough that ten minutes is enough cooking.
- "A very quick oven"Roughly the top of a modern domestic oven, somewhere around 450F or above, thoroughly preheated. Period terms do not convert exactly, but at anything gentler the ears dry out before they take any colour, which is the whole point of the dish.
- The paper liningUse parchment. Nineteenth-century kitchens lined pans with plain kitchen or butcher's paper to keep butter and sugar from scorching onto the tin; parchment does the same job and will not smoke at this temperature the way some papers do.
- Turn the earsThe original does not say to, but the ears only brown on the side facing the heat. Roll them once or twice during the ten to fifteen minutes so the kernels colour evenly all round.
- Corn has changedModern supersweet varieties are considerably sweeter and lose their sugar more slowly after picking than the field-to-pot corn assumed here, so they generally take the hot oven well. Older corn was better used young; today the timing is probably more forgiving.
- Butter and browningBrush lightly. Butter pooling on the paper will smoke at this heat, and a thin, even coat browns better than a thick one, which mostly steams and pools.
- "Serve on a napkin"A folded linen napkin on the platter was standard service for a number of dishes of this kind. Purely presentational now, though it does stop the ears rolling off the dish.
- YieldCount two ears per person as a side dish, one if it is part of a larger summer table. Serve immediately; roasted corn goes leathery as it cools.
Roasting corn in its own right is much older than the cookbook tradition that records it, and is generally traced to Native American practice, where ears were cooked in the husk in embers; the husked, buttered, oven-browned version here is a parlour-table adaptation, closer to what would later be done over charcoal. The instruction to serve on a napkin marks it as a dish for a set table rather than a picnic, at a period when corn on the cob was, it is often said, still slightly suspect as a genteel food precisely because there is no polite way to eat it.