Time to get corny!

Picking out produce at my favorite vegetable stand is weird this year. Sniffing the produce for ripeness is out. The stand has gloves everywhere and asks us to use them before handling anything, so I can't feel it as well as usual. This all makes it a bit harder to pick out good specimens, but hey, at least there's fresh produce! Luckily, sweet corn is still pretty easy. All I have to do is peel down a corner of the husk to see if the kernels are well developed but not overly mature, and at least I know that will be good.

That's the long way of saying that today's post is all about sweet corn.

First up is an old recipe from Better Homes and Gardens Heritage Cook Book (1975).

Dried Corn Salad represents the colonial period cooking of the "Middle Colonies"- Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Drying the corn took a week according to the note, but it's not like the settlers could pop on down to the supermarket for a can of creamed corn or a bag of frozen once summer was over. They'd just have to soak, salt, and simmer the dried corn, and then, if they had cabbage (seems likely) AND green peppers and sugar (seems much less so)... plus some vinegar and dry mustard-- bam! Dried corn salad.

I doubt the colonists had really nice serving dishes with a wavy border like the one in the picture, but their dried corn version of cole slaw had to be better than the canned pineapple and marshmallow variety invented much later.

On my hunt for recipes about a specific type of food, I always have to consult my home economics teacher sources, as they have so many recipes that the often deranged-seeming home ec teachers used to love. Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers: Vegetables Including Fruits (Favorite Recipes Press, 1966) offers up Scalloped Corn and Oysters. At first, I thought this was a recipe for scalloping corn oysters (the little corny cakes that are fried up to look like oysters), but it is actually corn scalloped with oysters.

When I saw that The Modern Woman's Encyclopaedic Cook Book (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1961) offered up Casserole of Sausage and Corn, I thought it might be pretty good. Corn is so sweet that the spicy snap of Italian sausage or the savory notes of smoked sausage can be a great contrast.

Vienna sausages, on the other hand... Why? The bland, musty mush of Vienna sausages will disappear into the white sauce if you're lucky and ruin the whole dish with its funk if you're not.

The Ladies' Home Journal Cookbook (ed. Carol Truax, 1960) offers up something that sounds much more sophisticated: Corn and Green Beans Smitane.

This one muddies up the creamed corn and green beans with a different potted meat-- a can of deviled ham this time-- but maybe the tang of the sour cream will help balance it out? Cooks in the '60s really loved their questionable canned meats, apparently.

It seems like the only thing my corn post is missing is a recipe that calls for canned soup. From The Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery (1971), I present Corn Scramble.

No, it would not be enough to simply scramble corn-sweet-corn into some freshly-beaten eggs, with maybe a bit of onion and green pepper for pep. What kind of a recipe is that? You need a can of tomato soup and a quarter cup of oil to make sure it's a big, red, slushy, oily mess. That's what vintage recipes are all about.

I think I'm going to stick with sautéing corn freshly cut off the cob in a little butter. I'm proud to be way lazier than the home ec teachers and recipe editors of the '60s and '70s.