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Green Corn in Cream
Cut off stems, remove leaves and silk from six fine, sound, fresh ears of green corn, place in a saucepan with two quarts boiling water, one gill milk and a teaspoon salt, and boil twenty-five minutes. Lift up, then with back of a knife blade detach grains from cobs, place in a small saucepan with one and a half gills cream, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper, half saltspoon grated nutmeg, and cook five minutes. Knead on a saucer one ounce butter with tablespoon flour and add to the corn. Mix until well thickened, let cook for three minutes more, pour in a vegetable dish and serve.
A creamed corn built on a butter-and-flour paste rather than a roux, from a period when corn was boiled far longer than anyone would boil it now. The measurements are the main obstacle.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one gill of milk is 1/2 cup and one and a half gills of cream is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three saltspoons of white pepper is 3/4 teaspoon, which is assertive but deliberate, and half a saltspoon of nutmeg is a scant 1/8 teaspoon.
- The 25-minute boilThis is the instruction to ignore. "Green corn" meant corn picked young, at the milk stage, and was generally tougher and starchier than modern supersweet hybrids, which are bred to be tender raw. Three to five minutes in boiling water is enough; twenty-five softens the kernels to paste and leaches the sugar into the water.
- Milk in the boiling waterThe gill of milk added to two quarts of water was thought to keep the kernels white and tender. It does little for modern corn and can catch on the pan bottom. Salted water alone is fine.
- Cutting the kernelsThe back of a knife blade scrapes rather than slices, which is what you want here the milky interior of each kernel comes out with the flesh and thickens the cream. Stand the cob in a shallow bowl to catch it.
- The butter and flour pasteKneading one ounce (2 tablespoons) of butter with a tablespoon of flour makes what is now called beurre manié. Add it in small pieces to the simmering cream and stir until it dissolves; dropped in as one lump it will leave floury streaks.
- Six ears is a lot of liquidSix ears yield somewhere between three and four cups of kernels, which 3/4 cup cream will barely coat once thickened. Expect a dense creamed corn rather than a soupy one, and loosen with a little of the cooking water if it stiffens too far.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish.
"Green corn" is the older American term for sweet corn eaten at the milk stage, before the kernels harden into the field corn that was ground for meal or fed to stock u2014 a distinction that mattered when most corn grown was not the eating kind. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks are full of green corn: boiled on the cob, in succotash, in fritters, in puddings, and creamed like this. The treatment here — cream, white pepper, grated nutmeg, a butter-and-flour binding — is a continental gloss on a plain country dish.