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Boiled Green Corn
Pare off stems, remove leaves and silk from six sound, tender ears green corn. Boil in a saucepan three quarts water, a gill milk, a tablespoon salt and a half ounce butter, then plunge in the corn and boil twenty-five minutes. Lift up, thoroughly drain, dress on a hot dish enveloped in a napkin and serve with a little melted butter separately.
A straightforward boil, but the timing belongs to a era of field corn picked at the starchy stage. Modern sweet corn needs a fraction of it.
- Twenty-five minutes is the thing to changeContemporary sweet corn varieties are bred for high sugar and tender pericarp; three to five minutes in boiling water is enough, and very fresh ears are good at two. A quarter hour or more turns the kernels pasty and drives off the sugar.
- "Green corn"This means fresh corn in the milk stage, as opposed to dried or field corn. Any modern sweet corn on the cob answers, the fresher the better.
- A gillA gill — Half a cup. Milk in the cooking water is traditionally said to keep the kernels pale; it is optional but harmless.
- Salt in the waterA tablespoon to three quarts is mild seasoning rather than a brine. Some cooks hold that salt toughens the kernels; sugar or nothing at all are both common now.
- Vessel and volumeThree quarts will not cover six ears in most saucepans. Use a wide stockpot or a deep skillet, and snap the cobs in half if that is what it takes to submerge them.
- Enveloped in a napkinA folded linen cloth on a warmed platter, with the corn laid inside and the cloth turned over it. It absorbs the drip and holds the heat, and it still works.
- YieldSix ears serves three to six people depending on whether corn is the side dish or most of the meal.
Boiled corn on the cob was a dish European visitors to nineteenth-century America often remarked on, both for the vegetable itself and for the frank business of eating it with the hands. "Green corn" as a market term distinguished the immature, sweet-stage ears sold in summer from the hard field corn ground into meal, and green-corn season was short: before refrigerated transport the sugars began converting to starch soon after picking. The finishing touches here — the napkin-lined dish, the melted butter passed separately — belong to a formal restaurant style of service applied to a plain New World vegetable.