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Boiled Corn
Put the well-cleaned ears in salted boiling water, boil an hour, or boil in the husk for the same time, remove husks and serve immediately. Corn thoroughly cooked is a wholesome dish.
A four-line recipe whose only real problem is the clock. Everything else stands.
- The hour is the thing to ignoreModern sweet corn needs 3 to 5 minutes in boiling water, or 2 to 3 minutes if the ears are very fresh and tender. An hour turns the kernels to mush and leaches most of the sugar into the pot.
- Why the book says an hourCorn boiled in a nineteenth-century kitchen was often field or dent corn pulled at the green roasting stage, starchier and tougher-skinned than a modern supersweet hybrid, though sugar corn varieties were also grown by this date. Longer cooking made more sense for that corn than it does for today's.
- Salting the waterSalt is harmless, though some cooks leave it out on the belief that it firms the kernel skins. A spoonful of sugar in the water is often said to help corn that has sat a few days since picking.
- Boiling in the huskStill a good method — the husk steams the ear and keeps it moist. Pull off the outer leaves and the silk tassel, leave the inner layers, and figure 5 to 7 minutes. The husks strip away easily once hot; use a towel.
- "Serve immediately"The most reliable instruction in the recipe. Sweet corn loses sugar quickly after picking, and a cooked ear held warm for twenty minutes is noticeably duller in flavour and texture.
- YieldOne to two ears per person as a side dish. Cook them in a wide pot with room to move rather than jammed upright in a stockpot.
Boiled green corn is one of the oldest continuously eaten dishes in North America, taken up from Native cultivation long before anyone wrote it into a cookbook, and by the time The Dixie Cook Book appeared it was too ordinary to need much explanation — hence four lines and a note on wholesomeness. That last clause is doing quiet work: nineteenth-century domestic writers are often said to have warned that undercooked or raw vegetables, corn especially, caused digestive complaints, and cooks may well have been urged toward long boiling on health grounds as much as texture. The book's brevity also reflects seasonality. Green corn arrived in a rush in midsummer, was eaten daily for a few weeks, and then vanished from the fresh table until the next year, kept through the winter in preserved forms such as hominy, meal, dried corn, or canned.