Home › Vegetables › Green Corn
Green Corn
Husk corn, removing all silk. Put corn into fresh boiling water to cover; and boil rapidly for 5 minutes. Remove from water and place on platter on which a napkin has been spread, covering corn with ends of napkin. Serve immediately.
A five-minute boil and a napkin: this is corn on the cob served the way a 1920s hostess would have sent it to table. Almost nothing needs changing except the timing, and that only because the corn itself has changed.
- "Green corn" is sweet cornThe term means fresh corn harvested at the milk stage, as opposed to field corn left to dry for meal and feed. Any sweet corn from the market is what is meant here.
- Five minutes is now too longThe supersweet and sugar-enhanced hybrids that dominate today hold their sugars far better than the older varieties this book assumed, and their kernels are more tender. Three minutes in boiling water is ample; very fresh corn needs only to be heated through.
- Do not salt the waterSalting the water — Cooks have long advised against it, on the belief that salt toughens the kernel skins, though the effect is disputed. Season at the table if you prefer, or add a spoonful of sugar or a splash of milk to the pot if the corn is past its best.
- Freshness is the hingeThe instruction to serve immediately applies to the picking as much as the pot. Corn begins converting sugar to starch the moment it leaves the stalk; refrigerate it in the husk and cook it the day you buy it.
- The napkinFolding a linen napkin over the platter keeps the ears hot and absorbs steam so they do not sit in their own water. A clean tea towel does the same job.
- YieldAllow one to two ears per person as a side dish. Serve with butter, salt and pepper; the recipe assumes the diner will do the seasoning.
Corn on the cob was one of the dishes European visitors to nineteenth-century America found most striking, and most inelegant — eating from the cob with both hands sat awkwardly beside the era's elaborate table manners, and etiquette books of the period argued about whether to cut the kernels off first. The napkin-lined platter here is a small piece of that negotiation: it dresses up a rustic dish for a company table. The distinction between "green corn" and corn generally mattered more then, when the same word covered the dried grain that went into cornmeal, hominy and hog feed.