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Stewed Corn
Husk the corn, remove the silk; throw the ears into boiling water, boil five minutes; drain and cool; draw a sharp knife down the centre of each row of grains, press the corn out with a blunt knife, put in a saucepan, and to each pint add one teaspoonful of sugar, a half teaspoonful of salt, one dash of pepper, a half cup of cream. Cook carefully for five minutes and serve very hot.
The latter part of the preparation is best done in a double boiler, as corn scorches very quickly.
A simple method that depends entirely on the scoring trick: splitting each row of kernels before scraping releases the milky interior and leaves the tough hulls on the cob.
- The hingeDraw the knife down the centre of each row, then press the pulp out with the back of a blunt knife rather than cutting the kernels off whole. What you get is corn milk and soft pulp, which is why so little liquid is needed and why it thickens on its own.
- Blanching timeFive minutes in boiling water is longer than modern sweet corn needs; the blanch mainly loosens the kernels and firms the milk. One to two minutes is enough, and the corn can be scraped without any blanching at all.
- ScorchingThe recipe's warning is worth heeding: corn milk is starch and sugar and catches quickly. If you use a saucepan directly rather than the double boiler the recipe prefers, keep it on low heat and stir constantly.
- QuantitiesA pint of scraped corn is roughly what you get from three to five ears, depending on size. A half cup of cream to a pint is generous by current taste; half that gives a looser, cornier dish.
- CreamGravity-separated cream skimmed from the top of the milk varied a good deal in richness and was often lighter than today's heavy cream, so light cream is a reasonable choice if you want a thinner, more old-fashioned texture; heavy cream gives a richer dish.
- Final cookingFive minutes is enough only if the corn is young. Cook until the liquid has thickened slightly and the starch no longer tastes raw, and stop there; long cooking turns the kernels pasty.
- YieldA pint of corn prepared this way serves four as a side dish.
Scraping corn from the cob rather than cutting it off is often said to be the older American practice, and it is what distinguishes true creamed or stewed corn from the buttered kernels sold in cans. The technique appears throughout nineteenth-century household cookery because sweet corn was a brief seasonal crop, generally eaten as soon after picking as possible, and the starchy milk of a slightly mature ear made a richer dish than a young one. The insistence on a double boiler is a mark of the period's cooking equipment: a wood or coal range gave a cook very little control over low heat, and instructions of this era frequently recommend the water bath as a reliable way to keep a starchy or dairy-based dish from catching.