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Boiled Green Corn
Remove the husks and threads; place corn in kettle; cover with boiling water and boil for three minutes. Place in cooker for one hour or more, depending upon the age of the corn. Drain and serve with salt and butter.
A fireless-cooker recipe: three minutes of active boiling, then an hour of retained heat in an insulated box. On a modern stove the whole thing collapses into a few minutes.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, often with soapstone or iron radiator discs heated on the range. Food was brought to a boil on the stove, then sealed in the box to finish on stored heat with no fuel. The "one hour or more" is coasting time, not cooking time.
- Doing it without the cookerFresh sweet corn needs 3 to 5 minutes in boiling water, no more. If you want the insulated approach, bring the pot to a rolling boil, cover, kill the heat and let it stand 10 minutes off the burner.
- Why the old corn took longerCorn of the period was picked and shipped without refrigeration, and its sugars turned to starch quickly, so older ears were starchier and slower to soften. Modern supersweet hybrids stay sweet for days and go mushy with the long hold.
- "Threads"The silk. Strip it by rubbing the ear down with a dry paper towel or a stiff brush; water only makes it cling.
- Salt the water or notThe original salts at the table, which is sound. Salted boiling water is fine, but sugar in the water does nothing worth the trouble, and acid or hard water will toughen the kernels.
- YieldFigure two ears per person as a side dish. Serve immediately; corn held hot in water for an hour, cooker or no cooker, loses both texture and sweetness.
Fireless cookery was a serious domestic movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century, promoted in cookbooks and home-economics bulletins as a way to save coal, wood and kitchen heat in summer, and commercial cookers were sold alongside homemade versions insulated with hay, excelsior or newspaper. Green corn, meaning fresh corn in the milk stage rather than dried field corn, was a summer staple in American households, and starchy older ears tolerated the long soak. That the instruction hinges on "the age of the corn" is itself a period detail: before refrigerated transport, how long an ear had been off the stalk mattered to the cook.