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Kitchen Table Kibitzing June 25, 2023 [1]
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Date: 2023-06-25
Corn
Seventy years ago, sweet corn wasn't all that sweet and had a short shelf-life, which made it difficult for grocery stores to stock it. The best way to prepare it was to harvest and immediately plunge it into boiling water. Even more radically, it was proposed to have the pot with boiling water actually in the garden, peel the husk on an ear still on the stalk, bend the stalk over and boil it while still attached.
John Laughnan was a corn geneticist and professor of botany. In the early 1950s he was studying the shrunken-2 (sh2) gene and discovered this gene led to corn that produced kernels with less starch and four times more sugar than other sweet corn at the time. When Laughnan started marketing his varieties of sweet corn with the sh2 gene, he developed the “Illini Supersweet” hybrid. This was not derived from GMO, but from hybridization. IFSI (Illinois Foundation Seeds Inc) developed a three-way hybrid named "Illini Xtra Sweet," becoming the first company to sell supersweet corn.
My early gardening took place in Mill Valley in the 70s. When I heard of the Supersweet variety I enthusiastically planted it and it was as sweet as advertised. Corn didn’t thrive in my location due to pervasive fog and lack of sun. I grew it again when we moved to Sonoma County. There, the problem was raccoons, who, on the exact day before it would reach perfect ripeness, would strip every ear off the stalks, no matter how cleverly I had the corn patch fenced.
People prepare corn on the cob their own way, but I’ve found it best to leave the husk on and microwave it for four minutes (varies with your microwave). Tricky to peel a hot husk, but the corn is perfect. To butter an ear, the best way is how it was done at the Wisconsin State Fair when I was a kid (pre-supersweet). There was a vat of melted Wisconsin butter and you dipped the whole ear in. Of course, our clothes were covered with melted butter, but….
Fresh corn on the cob is a summer delight, but nobody enjoys it as much as this kid:
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