Home › Recipes › Sugar Corn Salad
Sugar Corn Salad
Like the Lima beans salad, and to be dished up with the salad cream as a sauce, in vegetable dishes. The grains of corn are required to be distinct and clean and free from mush, and should be washed in a colander for the purpose. Before going on to describe the other available everyday salad dressings let us include one more variety best dressed with the bright hollandaise.
This is a cross-reference recipe: it assumes you have already read the Lima bean salad and the dressing chapter, and gives you only the one detail that is specific to corn. The whole point is the rinsing.
- The hinge: rinse away the starchCanned or freshly cut sweet corn carries a cloudy starch liquor that turns a dressed salad gluey. Tip the kernels into a colander, run cold water through until it comes out clear, then drain well and pat dry so the dressing clings rather than slides.
- "Sugar corn"Period shorthand for sweet corn as opposed to field or dent corn grown for meal and stock feed. Canned sugar corn would have been one likely source; whole kernels cut from cooked cobs work equally well.
- "Vegetable dishes"Not a preparation but a serving vessel: the small oval or round covered side dishes that came out with a table service. Modern equivalent is simply individual bowls or a shallow serving dish.
- Salad creamIn books of this period the name is often used for a cooked or boiled dressing thickened with egg and flour, sharpened with vinegar and mustard, thinned with cream. That kind of dressing is closer to a pourable mayonnaise than to the bottled British condiment now sold under the name.
- Hollandaise hereThe last line points forward to the next salad, not to this one. If you do dress corn with hollandaise, use it barely warm and serve at once, since it breaks as it cools and sets into a film on cold kernels.
- Temperature and seasoningServe cool but not fridge-cold, which mutes both the corn and the dressing. The original gives no seasoning instruction at all, so taste the dressed salad before adding salt.
- YieldNone given. Reckon on about a cup and a half of drained kernels, roughly one 15 oz can or three cobs, to serve four as a side salad, with 3 to 4 tablespoons of dressing.
Corn served cold under a boiled dressing depends on reliable canned sugar corn, which made a vegetable salad possible in any month. The manuals of the era treat salads as an assembly problem: cook or open the vegetable, get it dry and distinct, then choose from a short standing list of dressings, which is exactly the logic of this entry and why the author can dispose of the dish in four sentences by pointing back to the Lima bean salad. The insistence on grains "free from mush" reflects the real weakness of early canning, where long retort times left kernels soft and the packing liquid thick with starch.