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Stewed Corn
3 cups corn. 1/2 cup rich milk. 1 cup water. 1 tablespoon butter. Cut corn from cob. Scrape out pulp. Put in stew pan with water. Cover and cook until tender, which requires about twenty minutes. Add butter and cream before taking from fire; also pepper and salt.
A plain method for fresh corn cut from the cob, from an era when field corn reached the kitchen starchier and tougher than today's varieties. Two small changes make it work now.
- Cut, then scrapeThe scraping is the point of the dish. After slicing off the kernel tops, run the back of a knife down the cob to press out the milky pulp; that starch is what thickens the liquid into a sauce rather than leaving corn floating in water.
- Twenty minutes is too longModern sweet corn hybrids are tender raw. Five to eight minutes at a bare simmer is enough; the original timing was written for older, starchier corn and will turn today's kernels flabby and grey.
- QuantitiesThree cups of cut kernels is roughly four to six medium ears. The dish serves four as a side.
- Mrs. Wilson lists half a cup of "rich milk" in the ingredients and then calls for "cream" in the method; she means the same thing. Use half a cup of half-and-half or light cream.
- Add the dairy off the boilAdd the dairy at the end -- The original has butter and cream go in just before the pan leaves the fire. Pulling it off direct heat first is safer: boiling after the cream is in encourages it to break, and the corn starch already present makes the mixture catch on the bottom.
- If you use frozen cornFrozen kernels are already blanched and carry no cob pulp, so the liquid will stay thin. Reduce the water to about a third of a cup and heat only until warmed through.
Mrs. Wilson's cook book dates from around 1920, when she wrote widely for a general household audience on thrift and vegetable cookery. Stewed corn belongs to a line of American cob-scraping dishes, and the milky pulp pressed from the cob does thickening work that flour or a roux does elsewhere; a related technique appears in fried corn. Its brevity here is characteristic of the book, which assumes a cook who already knows what a stew pan and a moderate fire look like and needs only the proportions.