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Green Corn Sautes
Cut off stalks, remove leaves and silk from six medium, sound ears green corn. Plunge in three quarts boiling water with one gill milk and a teaspoon salt, and boil twenty-five minutes. Lift up, let cool off a little. Carefully run a knife between the sections-lengthwise-so as to easily detach from cob, then with back of knife blade press grains off cobs. Have an ounce butter in a black frying pan, and when it is thoroughly hot add the corn. Season with half a teaspoon salt and three satlspoons pepper, toss well and fry ten minutes, frequently tossing meanwhile. Transfer to a vegetable dish and serve.
A plain sauté of fresh sweet corn cut from the cob. The one thing to change is the boiling time, which belongs to an era of field corn picked at the milk stage and hauled to market slowly.
- Green cornNot a variety but a stage: ears picked while the kernels are still soft and milky. Modern supersweet varieties are the same idea, bred to hold their sugar for days rather than hours.
- Twenty-five minutes is far too longTwenty-five minutes is far too long by modern standards -- Sweet corn from a supermarket needs 3 to 5 minutes in boiling water, and corn just picked needs barely 2. Boiled for 25 minutes the kernels turn pasty and the sugars leach out, and then they get fried for another ten.
- A gill of milkHalf a cup. Milk in the cooking water is a traditional touch said to sweeten the corn and keep the kernels tender; salted boiling water alone works nearly as well.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so three is roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper for six ears. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust.
- An ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. For a full six ears' worth of kernels in a wide pan you may want a little more so they do not stick before any moisture cooks off.
- A black frying panCast iron or heavy black steel: a pan that holds heat and browns rather than steams. The frying stage is where the flavor develops; keep the pan hot and the corn moving, and expect a few browned kernels.
- Cutting the kernelsScoring lengthwise between the rows before pushing the grains off with the back of the knife keeps them whole instead of shredding them. Do it over a bowl or a sheet pan; the cut kernels travel.
- YieldSix ears gives roughly 3 to 4 cups of kernels, enough as a side for four to six.
"Green corn" was standard American usage through the nineteenth century for maize eaten fresh in the milk stage rather than dried for meal, and the practice is often traced to Native American cooking, where green corn harvests were marked by ceremony in the Southeast well before European settlement. This book, compiled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, sets such homely American vegetable dishes alongside French and Italian material; one might read the "international" of the title as a restaurant cook's inventory of everything a New York kitchen might be asked for. The doubled cooking — boil, then sauté in butter — may have had something to do with the state of corn arriving at market, its sugars already turning to starch: long boiling softened it, and the frying pan put back some flavor.