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Green Corn-Boiled
Throw the ears, when husked, into a kettle of boiling water, slightly salted and boil thirty minutes. Serve in a napkin.
Two sentences of instruction that need one correction and a little context. The corn on sale today is not the corn this cook was boiling.
- The timing is the whole issueThirty minutes suited the starchier field and early sweet varieties of the 1870s, which were generally cooked well through. Modern sugary-enhanced and supersweet hybrids are tender enough to eat raw; three to five minutes in boiling water is usually enough, and long boiling does them no favours.
- "Green corn"Not a colour but a stage: ears picked immature, while the kernels are still milky, as opposed to corn left to dry on the stalk for meal. Modern sweet corn on the cob is exactly what is meant.
- Salting the waterSlight salting is fine. Heavy salting is sometimes said to toughen the kernel skins; in practice the corn takes up little either way, and salting at the table works as well.
- Serve in a napkinThe ears are drained and piled in a folded cloth napkin on a dish, the cloth taking up the wet and helping keep them hot. A linen-lined bowl does the same job now.
- Buy it freshThe instruction to husk and boil assumes corn newly off the stalk. The open-pollinated varieties of the period lost their sugar to starch quickly after picking; today's varieties hold their sugar for several days refrigerated in the husk.
- YieldFigure one to two ears a person as a side dish. Use a wide kettle so the ears sit in a single layer and cook evenly.
Corn on the cob is one of the dishes American cookery is often said to have taken from Indigenous practice and never disguised: green or "roasting" ears eaten straight from the hand, seasonal, briefly available, and requiring no skill beyond a pot of water. Nineteenth-century household books treat it accordingly, giving it two lines where a made dish would get twenty. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by local women and sold for charity, and its brevity here is characteristic of the genre: recipes were written for cooks who already knew the dish and needed only a reminder of the times and the manner of serving. The napkin may have been welcome at any table, since eating corn from the cob defeated most of the era's rules about the fork.