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Roast Green Corn
Cut off the stalks, remove the leaves and silk from six ears of fresh, sound green corn, place them in a saucepan with two quarts water, one gill of milk and teaspoon salt, and boil twenty minutes only. Lift up with a skimmer, drain on a cloth, then place them on a tin, lightly baste with a little melted butter, then set them in a brisk oven until a nice, golden colour being careful to turn them once in a while. Remove, dress on a hot dish, envelope in a napkin and serve.
A two-stage treatment: the ears are boiled, then browned in a hot oven with butter. The method still works, but the boiling time belongs to a different kind of corn.
- "Green corn" means fresh sweet cornIn American cookbooks of this period green corn is corn picked at the milk stage, as opposed to dried field corn. Any fresh sweet corn on the cob is what is wanted.
- A gillHalf a cup. In two quarts of water it does very little beyond a faint whitening; milk in the pot was thought to keep the kernels tender and pale.
- Twenty minutes is far too longOlder field and market varieties were likely starchier and stood up to longer boiling than modern supersweet hybrids, which are done in three to five minutes. Since the ears then go into a hot oven, cut the boil to about three minutes or the kernels will collapse and toughen.
- A brisk ovenRoughly 425-450F, though period oven terms were never standardised. The ears want colour quickly, not further cooking -- eight to twelve minutes with a turn halfway is enough once they are already boiled.
- "A tin"A shallow baking sheet or roasting tin. Line it if you would rather not scrub caramelised butter later.
- Salt in the waterA teaspoon in two quarts is a token amount and will not season the kernels. Most of the seasoning has to come from the basting butter and the table.
- Enveloped in a napkinThe corn is piled on a hot dish and the folded napkin wrapped round to hold the heat and absorb steam, so the ears do not sit in their own water. The same napkin service is often described for boiled corn, asparagus and toast.
- YieldSix ears serves three to six, depending on whether the corn is a course or a side.
Corn on the cob was one of the dishes that most struck European visitors to nineteenth-century America -- eaten from the hand, at table, in a manner English writers of the period often described as barbarous. The two-stage boil-then-brown treatment here is a compromise between plain boiled corn and true roasting in the husk over embers, which was the older field and harvest-time method; it gives some of the toasted flavour without the ashes. The napkin service, on the other hand, was a common enough refinement of the period, appearing in domestic cookery books as well as in hotel dining rooms.