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Corn
Remove husks and silk. Cook in a small amount of water from five to fifteen minutes. Cover while cooking with the inside green husks. Serve on the cob; or cut from the cob and serve with salt, pepper, and butter. Corn may be made into fritters (see recipe) or mixed with beans for succotash. Also served as pudding mixed with eggs and milk.
A bare-bones method from an era when corn came to the kitchen the same day it was picked. The timing reflects field corn varieties, not the supersweet hybrids on sale now.
- Cut the time downFive to fifteen minutes suited the starchier varieties of the period. Modern sugar-enhanced and supersweet corn needs far less; three to five minutes in boiling water is generally enough, and long boiling toughens the kernels.
- "A small amount of water"The recipe does not say how much; an inch or so in a wide pan will steam rather than boil the ears. Some cooks avoid salting the water, on the traditional belief that salt firms the kernel skins.
- The husk trickLaying the pale inner husks over the ears is the one instruction worth keeping. They hold in steam and lend a faint grassy sweetness, and they cost nothing since you have just pulled them off.
- Freshness is the whole dishCorn sugars begin converting to starch as soon as the ear is cut. Refrigerate unhusked and cook within a day or two; supermarket corn benefits from the shorter cooking time above.
- Cutting from the cobStand the cooked ear upright in a wide bowl and run a knife down the rows, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to get the milky pulp. That scraping is what makes creamed corn and corn pudding taste of corn.
- The pudding and succotash notesOnly the fritters carry an actual cross-reference; the pudding and succotash are mentioned in passing. A corn pudding is typically something like two cups of cut kernels to two eggs and a cup of milk, baked gently in a water bath until just set. Succotash is corn and shell beans in roughly equal measure, though the proportions and whether cream is used vary.
- YieldTwo ears per person on the cob; figure three ears for roughly a cup and a half of cut kernels.
Sweet corn eaten green off the cob is one of the few genuinely American contributions to the nineteenth-century table. Lowney's was published by the Walter M. Lowney Co., a Massachusetts chocolate firm, as a general household book. The three follow-on suggestions - fritters, succotash, pudding - are the standard New England repertoire, and succotash itself carries a borrowed name, generally traced to the Narragansett word msickquatash for boiled corn kernels.