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To Warm Over Cold Corn
Cold corn left from dinner may be cut carefully from the cob, covered with milk, put in a double boiler and cooked ten minutes. Add butter, salt and pepper to taste.
A leftovers note rather than a formal recipe, and it works as well now as it did then. A few points on quantities and method.
- Cutting the kernelsStand each cob on end in a wide bowl and run the knife down close to the cob. Scraping the cob with the back of the blade afterwards will release what milky pulp remains, though a cooked cob gives up far less of it than a raw one.
- Milk quantityThe original gives none, only "covered with milk." Enough to just cover the kernels is the guide; for the corn from four ears that is well under a cupful. Too much and you have soup rather than creamed corn.
- Why a double boilerMilk scorches and skins over direct heat, and the sugars in corn catch easily. Set a bowl or saucepan over simmering water, or use a heavy pan over low heat and stir often.
- Ten minutes is right hereThe corn is already cooked; the time is only to heat it through and let the starch thicken the milk slightly. Longer will not improve it and will toughen the kernels.
- Seasoning at the endThe book adds butter, salt and pepper after the cooking rather than before. Butter stirred in at the finish gives a glossier sauce.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. On the four-ear basis suggested above, this would serve two to three as a side dish.
- Storage of the leftoversThe cooked corn should have been refrigerated promptly after the first meal, not left standing at room temperature — a nineteenth-century larder assumption worth updating.
Corn on the cob was a seasonal glut food in American households, and cookbooks of the period are full of instructions for using the surplus rather than throwing it out: corn oysters, corn pudding, succotash, corn fritters. This entry is essentially improvised creamed corn, reconstructing from cooked kernels what would otherwise be made from fresh ones scraped raw. Double boilers were common in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century kitchens, and coal and wood ranges, with their uneven and hard-to-lower heat, gave good reason to protect any dish involving milk.