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To Boil Green Corn
Strip off the outer shucks, leaving only the thin white ones. Cut off the ends. Throw into boiling water. Boil an hour. Strip off the silk with the shuck. Cut from the cob while hot. Sprinkle over salt, add a tablespoonful fresh butter and serve hot.--Mrs. S. T.
A straightforward method with one instruction that no modern cook should follow: the hour-long boil. Everything else here is still sound, including the trick of leaving the inner husks on.
- The timing is the whole problemModern sweet corn needs 3 to 5 minutes in boiling water, or less if it is very fresh. An hour turns the kernels to paste and drives out the sugars. Corn of this period was generally starchier and tougher-skinned than modern supersweet hybrids, and long boiling times do appear in other cookbooks of the era.
- "Green corn"Not a variety or a colour but a stage: ears picked young, while the kernels are still soft and milky, as opposed to corn left to dry on the stalk for meal and hominy. What we simply call sweet corn.
- Leaving the thin white shucksWorth keeping. The inner husks steam the ear and keep it from waterlogging, and they pull the silk away cleanly afterward, which is the point of the instruction that follows.
- Salting the waterSalting at the end rather than in the water. Salting the boiling water is often said to toughen the kernel skins, though this is kitchen lore rather than settled; sugar or milk in the water is a refinement this recipe does not call for.
- Cutting from the cobDo it in a wide bowl, standing the ear upright, and run the back of the knife down the stripped cob afterward to press out the milky residue, which carries much of the flavour.
- ButterA tablespoon of butter is for a serving dish of a few ears, not for a large crowd. Figure one to two ears per person and butter to taste.
Boiled green corn is one of the plainest entries in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), and its presence says something about the book's method: Marion Cabell Tyree collected contributions from named Virginia housekeepers, initials and all, so the volume preserves how particular households actually did things rather than a single authorial standard. Corn at the milk stage was a brief summer luxury in the era before refrigerated shipping, since the sugars begin converting to starch within hours of picking, which is why so many nineteenth-century sources insist on cooking it the same day it is gathered. The habit of cutting the kernels off while hot and dressing them with butter and salt, rather than serving the ear whole, is often said to have been a familiar Southern practice, and it points toward the stewed corn dishes of the period.