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Boiled Green Corn
Remove husks and silky threads. Cook ten to twenty minutes in boiling water. Place on platter covered with napkin; draw corners of napkin over corn; or cut from cob and season with butter and salt.
Fannie Farmer's instructions assume field corn picked that morning and starchy enough to need real cooking. Modern supersweet hybrids do not.
- Cut the time hardTen to twenty minutes will leave today's sweet corn limp and washed out. Drop shucked ears into boiling water, cover, and take them out at three to five minutes; very fresh, very sweet corn is done as soon as the water returns to a boil.
- Don't salt the waterSome older manuals warned that salt toughens the kernels. Whether or not that holds, this recipe uses plain boiling water and seasons afterwards; salt at the table or in the butter.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin on the platter absorbs the steam so the ears don't sit in their own water, and the corners folded over keep them hot on the way to the table. A clean tea towel does the same job.
- Silk removalRub the shucked ear briskly with a dry, stiff vegetable brush or a damp paper towel; the remaining threads come away far more readily than by picking.
- Cutting from the cobStand the ear in a wide bowl and cut down with a heavy knife, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to release the milky pulp, which carries much of the sweetness. Season with butter and salt off the heat.
- YieldReckon two ears per person as a side dish; cut from the cob, an average ear gives roughly ¾ cup of kernels.
- Choosing the cornKernels should be plump and milky when pressed, not doughy; overmature ears will stay chewy no matter how long you boil them.
"Green corn" is the old American term for maize picked immature, at the milk stage, as a vegetable — as opposed to the ripe, dried grain used for meal, hominy and feed. Green corn appears in this book's vegetable section alongside recipes for corn pudding, succotash and fritters. Farmer was writing at the Boston Cooking School in the 1890s, when a New England household's sweet corn came from a nearby farm or garden in a short late-summer season; the common advice was to cook it the day it was picked, because the sugars turn to starch quickly. The breeding work that produced today's sugar-enhanced and supersweet varieties, which hold their sweetness for days, came generations later.