Corn Saute
3 cups green corn cut from the cob 2 tablespoons Mazola 1 minced green pepper 1 pimiento cut in dice 1/2 tablespoon Karo, Red Label Salt and pepper Heat the Mazola and Karo in a frying pan, add the pepper and pimiento, cook two or three minutes, add the corn and cook five minutes, stirring constantly. Season to taste.
A three-minute vegetable side from a corn-products promotional cookbook, built entirely around the sponsor's brands. It works, but a few of the ingredient names need translating.
- Mazola and KaroMazola is corn oil, marketed by its makers as a substitute for butter and lard; any neutral oil works. Karo Red Label was the darker, more strongly flavoured corn syrup of the line, closer to today's dark corn syrup than to the light Blue Label.
- How much sweetenerHalf a tablespoon is 1 1/2 teaspoons for three cups of corn, so this is a background note rather than a candied dish. With good summer corn you can leave it out entirely.
- Green cornThis means fresh sweet corn cut from the cob at the milk stage, not a green-coloured variety. Three cups is roughly five to six ears. Frozen kernels substitute directly but need only two to three minutes, since they are already blanched.
- Scrape the cobsThe recipe does not call for it, but after cutting the kernels many cooks run the back of the knife down each cob to release the starchy milk, which thickens the pan a little.
- PimientoJarred pimientos are cooked, sweet red peppers, sold canned or in jars; drain and pat dry before dicing. A roasted red pepper from a jar is the closest current equivalent.
- Constant stirringWith sugar in the pan and starch coming off the kernels, the mixture catches quickly over high heat. Medium heat and a wide pan keep it from scorching in five minutes.
- YieldServes four as a side dish. Season at the end, as directed.
This comes from one of the cookbooks issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, the maker of both Mazola oil and Karo syrup, and the recipe is essentially a demonstration piece: corn kernels cooked in corn oil with corn syrup. Booklets of this kind were given away free or sold for a few cents in the early decades of the twentieth century, and they are often said to have done real work in persuading American cooks that a bottled vegetable oil could stand in for butter and lard. The dish itself belongs to the long tradition of quick summer corn preparations that follow the harvest of "green corn" in late July and August, and the diced pimiento, ubiquitous in American cooking of the period once canned pimientos, grown and packed largely in Georgia, became cheap and widely distributed, is there mostly for colour against the yellow kernels and the green pepper.