To Boil Corn
Remove the husks and silk from the ears; boil until cooked; cut the corn from the cob, season with salt, white pepper and melted butter and serve in a heated dish; or lay the ears on a platter and serve.
A bare-bones set of instructions that assumes a cook already knows what "until cooked" means. With modern sweet corn, that phrase is the whole problem.
- Boiling timePeriod sources generally boil corn far longer than we would, often a quarter of an hour or more, and older field and open-pollinated varieties were starchier. Today's sugary and supersweet hybrids need only 3 to 5 minutes in boiling water, or they turn tough and lose their sweetness.
- Salt the water later, or not at allSalt in the cooking water is often said to toughen the kernels' skins; sugar or a splash of milk is the traditional alternative. The recipe seasons after cooking anyway, which is the sounder approach.
- Silk removalAfter husking, rub each ear downward with a dry paper towel or a stiff vegetable brush. Wet hands only push the silk back into the rows.
- White pepperPale food was commonly seasoned with white pepper so that dark flecks would not show. Black pepper will do here if that is what is open, though it is slightly sharper.
- Cutting from the cobStand the boiled ear on its end in a wide bowl and cut downward, then run the back of the knife down the stripped cob to press out the milky pulp, which adds a good deal of flavor to the dish.
- YieldFigure two ears per person on the cob, or roughly half to three-quarters of a cup of cut kernels from each medium ear.
Boiled green corn was a dish that nineteenth-century cookbooks recorded almost without comment, on the assumption that nobody needed telling. Sweet corn was picked young, when the kernels were still in the milk stage, and it was understood to be a food that had to be eaten the day it was cut; the sugars in older open-pollinated varieties turned to starch within hours, which is why so many period sources insist on running from the field to the kettle. The sweeter, slower-converting hybrids that make supermarket corn workable are a much later development, and they are the reason a modern cook can ignore the urgency this recipe silently assumes.