to boil indian corn
(from New Receipts for Cooking, by Eliza Leslie, 1854)
Ingredients:
Instructions:
Ingredients:
full grown corn
boiling water
salt
pepper
butter
Instructions:
Corn for boiling should be full grown, but young and tender, and the grains soft and milky. If its grain are becoming hard and yellow, it is too old for boiling. Strip the ears of their leaves and the silk. Put them into a large pot of boiling water, and boil it rather fast for half an hour or more, in proportion to its size and age. When done, take it up, drain it, dish it under a cover, or napkin, and serve it up hot. Before eating it, rub each ear with salt and pepper, and then spread it with butter. Epicures in corn consider it sweetest when eaten off the cob. And so it is; but before company few persons like to hold an ear of Indian corn in their hands, and bite the grains off the cob with their teeth. Therefore it is more frequently cut off the cob into a dish; mixed with salt, pepper, and butter, and helped with a spoon.
It is said that young green corn will boil sufficiently in ten minutes, (putting it of course into a pot of boiling water.) Try it.
Another way. - Having pulled off the silk, boil the corn, without removing the leaves that enclose the cob. With the leaves or husk on, it will require a longer time to cook, but is sweeter and more nutritious.
August is when the corn comes in in New York and there's no better way to eat it than straight off the cob! Early settlers to the Americas saw the native peoples eating corn this way and soon joined in. By early in the nineteenth-century, vendors walked the streets in American cities selling hot corn to passers by. As simple as cooking and serving corn on the cob is, it didn't stop the well known Mrs Leslie from putting a recipe in New Receipts for Cooking, published in Philadelphia in 1854.
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