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Stewed Corn with Tomatoes
Scald and peel six good-sized tomatoes, cut them in pieces, put them in a porcelain-lined kettle with a tablespoonful of butter and a slice of onion; stew slowly thirty minutes. Husk one dozen ears of corn, score down the centre of each row of grains, press out the pulp; add it to the tomatoes, cook ten minutes. Add another tablespoonful of butter and a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper. After adding the corn, watch carefully or the corn will settle to the bottom of the pan and scorch. Serve very hot.
A plain succotash-adjacent stew that depends on two things: a nonreactive pan and constant attention once the corn goes in. Both are addressed in the original, but neither is explained.
- Porcelain-lined kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or enamel-on-steel pot — a nonreactive surface. Tomatoes stewed thirty minutes in bare cast iron or aluminium pick up a metallic taste and dull colour. Stainless steel or enamelled ware is the modern equivalent.
- Scoring the cornRun a knife tip down the centre of each row of kernels, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to press out pulp and milk, leaving the tough hulls behind. This is the whole point of the dish — it produces a creamy body rather than loose kernels, and cutting the kernels off whole instead gives a different, thinner result.
- Twelve earsScraped this way, a dozen ears yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of pulp. If your ears are large, eight to ten may be closer to the intended volume against six tomatoes.
- The hinge: scorchingCorn pulp is heavy with starch and sugar and drops straight to the bottom of the pan, where it catches within a minute or two. Stir continuously over low heat for the whole ten minutes, or use a heat diffuser. A scorched bottom flavours the entire pot and cannot be stirred out.
- Scalding and peelingThirty seconds in boiling water, then cold water, and the skins slip off. Six good-sized tomatoes is roughly 2 to 2½ lb; in winter, tinned whole plum tomatoes, drained and chopped, stew down to much the same thing.
- The slice of onionA single slice is a background note, not an ingredient in its own right. Fish it out before serving if you want the clean corn-and-tomato flavour the recipe is after.
- Seasoning at the endSalt and pepper are added only after the corn has cooked. A pinch of sugar is a common modern addition if the tomatoes are sharp.
- YieldServes six as a side dish. It thickens considerably as it stands, which is why the instruction to serve very hot matters.
Corn and tomatoes cooked together is one of the older American vegetable combinations, resting on the fact that the two crops come ripe in the same weeks of late summer — a seasonal pairing before it was ever a culinary one. The scoring-and-pressing method described here is the household equivalent of what was later sold commercially as "cream style" corn, and versions of it appear in nineteenth-century cookbooks; the object was to capture the sweet milk inside the kernel while discarding the tough hull. The insistence on a porcelain-lined kettle reflects a known period concern about acidic foods and unlined metal.