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Green Corn Sautes, Creole
Cut away stalks, remove leaves and silk from six fresh, sound white ears green corn. Then with back of a knife blade detach from the cobs. Heat a tablespoon oil in a frying pan, add one finely chopped seeded green pepper and one small chopped white onion. Nicely brown three minutes, add corn and fry eight minutes, occasionally tossing meanwhile; add two finely chopped peeled red tomatoes. Season with half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon sugar, toss well and cook eight minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile. Dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A plain skillet dish of corn, pepper, onion and tomato that stands or falls on the corn being fresh. Everything else is seasoning.
- Six ears is about four cupsSix medium ears yield roughly 3 to 4 cups of kernels, enough for four as a side. Frozen corn will work but gives none of the starchy milk that thickens the pan.
- "White ears green corn"Green corn means fresh, immature sweet corn, not a colour. The recipe specifies white ears, and white varieties were often called for in this period; any sweet corn at peak season does the job.
- Cutting the kernelsThe original calls only for detaching the kernels with the back of a knife blade. In practice it is easier to cut them off with a sharp edge first, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to release the milk; the scraping is the part worth keeping.
- The green pepperA plain green bell pepper is what is meant. Seeded, and chopped fine enough that it softens in the three minutes it gets.
- Peeled tomatoesTwo tomatoes, blanched and skinned. Out of season, use about a cup of drained canned tomatoes and cut the salt slightly, since canned are usually salted.
- A tablespoon of oil is leanThat is little fat for a full pan of corn. Butter or bacon fat in place of some of the oil keeps the corn from catching, though the recipe as written calls only for oil.
- The half teaspoon of sugarThe recipe does not say why; with the tomatoes going in at the same time it most likely offsets their acid rather than sweetening the dish. With very sweet modern hybrid corn it can be dropped.
- TimingEight minutes of frying then eight more with tomatoes will take the corn well past crisp. If you want the kernels to keep some bite, cut both stages to about five minutes and let the tomatoes reduce rather than stew.
Filippini's International Cook Book appends national tags to its dish titles, and "Creole" here means New Orleans rather than the Caribbean: the trio of corn, sweet pepper and tomato, cooked down in fat, is the backbone of Louisiana vegetable cookery. The dish sits close to maque choux, the corn-and-tomato smother usually traced to the meeting of French Louisiana and local Native American corn cookery, though the name's origin is disputed and the connection is traditional rather than documented. What marks it as a period recipe is the insistence on fresh green corn cut and scraped by hand at the moment of cooking.