Home › I › Indian Corn, Roasted
Indian Corn, Roasted
INGREDIENTS. Unripe, or green, corn, butter, salt.
Strip the green ears of their leaves, and roast before a quick fire till the grain is brown. Serve with oiled butter. Indian corn may be used also for soups as peas are.
Two lines of Victorian shorthand for corn on the cob cooked over fire. The whole thing hinges on the state of the corn and the ferocity of the heat.
- "Unripe, or green, corn"This means sweet corn at the milk stage — a pierced kernel should squirt cloudy liquid, not a starchy paste. Field corn left to harden is fit only for meal, and no amount of roasting will save it.
- "A quick fire"Direct, fierce heat: glowing coals, a gas grill run hot, or a broiler at its highest setting. The recipe assumes an open fire and gives no oven setting; if adapting to an oven, use a hot one and turn the ears. The point is to colour the kernels before the interior dries out.
- TimingNaked ears over live coals take roughly 8 to 12 minutes, turned every couple of minutes until the kernels are patched with brown and just yielding. The original gives no time because the cook was watching the fire; watch it.
- Stripped versus huskedBeeton strips the leaves away, which gives char and smoke but dries the ears quickly. Brushing them with butter or oil before they go on the heat, and again while turning, keeps them from toughening.
- "Oiled butter"Butter melted gently until it runs oily; in modern terms simply melted butter. It is served as a sauce for dipping or brushing, not stirred into anything.
- YieldOne to two ears per person as a side dish. The recipe lists salt but does not say when to add it; salting after cooking is the usual modern preference.
- The soup note"Used also for soups as peas are" means the kernels treated like green peas: cut from the cob and simmered in a soup. The original gives no further detail; scraping the cobs for their starchy liquid is a later refinement, not something the text calls for.
In nineteenth-century Britain "corn" meant grain in general, chiefly wheat, so maize needed the qualifier "Indian" — a usage inherited from early colonists in the Americas, who called it Indian corn to mark it as the native crop. Green corn eaten straight off the cob is often said to have been regarded in British books of this period as an American and colonial habit rather than a domestic one; maize was grown in England mainly as fodder, and sweet corn only became a common British vegetable in the twentieth century.