"Give me fresh corn and wheat --
give me serene-moving animals ..."
-- Walt Whitman,
"Give Me The Splendid, Silent Sun," Leaves of Grass
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| Unicorn on the cob 7-28-14 |
"A light wind swept over the corn,
and all nature laughed in the sunshine."
-- Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
It's a magical time of year here in Ohio.
The sweet corn is on and the living is good.
Sweet corn season is brief, but around here we live for it.
Probably every sweet-corn growing town in the state thinks it has bragging rights to the sweetest, tenderest, tastiest ears. But I'd go all in and bet the house that the stuff grown at the Hahn Farm right here in my little town buries them all.
Hahn's corn is legendary in these parts. When the first picking is in and they finally hang the sign by the road, people start calling each other to breathlessly announce "Hahn's has corn!"
A constant flow of cars -- many with out of state license plates -- queues up early every morning in a snaking line that often runs all the way down the driveway and into the road. They pick fresh every day, and you gotta get their early, before they sell out.
For the next several weeks, families around here will gorge themselves on Hahn's corn. They will stash it away in their freezers for winter. They will eat and eat and eat until they're sick, and then they will eat more.
It's just that good. And we know it won't last forever.
I've had other sweet corn, naturally.
Some is pretty good. Some is merely fine. Some sucks.
None of it measures up to the ambrosia grown at Hahn's. This corn has made me into such a corn snob that I will not eat sweet corn from anyplace else.
Also, as a child I was traumatized by sweet corn drama.
I grew up thinking there was some special skill or technique or culinary wizardry required to prepare delicious sweet corn. Getting it right was akin to locating a passageway to a parallel universe, or spotting a unicorn.
Here's how it went:
My dad would buy a dozen of the cheapest who-knows-how-old ears he could find at some random roadside stand or grocery store and tote it home for my mother to boil. She boiled it. He watched like a hawk and as soon as he smelled the corn cooking he'd bark, "I smell the corn!" That was Mom's signal to shut it down and stop the cooking. Which she did.
Tension would build as my dad parked his elbows on the table and sloppily buttered and ear. We all waited for the verdict -- did Mom get it right or did she fuck it up, again?
You never knew. It was always a crap-shoot.
If she got it right, he'd just keep chomping away, stacking up a log-pile of kernel-less cobs, a shiny slick of butter running down his chin.
If she fucked it up and the corn was tough or chewy or overcooked or not sweet, he'd deliver the death knell -- always the same two harsh words.
"It's starchy."
My mother's spine would stiffen, her face would twitch. My three sisters and I would sit in wide-eyed anxious limbo exchanging panicky glances and wondering "Do we eat the corn or don't we? WHATTHEFUCK should we do?"
See, I was led to believe that if the corn was a failure, it was my mom's fault for cooking it wrong.
Now I know better.
Mom wasn't a bad corn cook. She was just cooking bad corn.
If you start with perfectly good corn, it will be perfectly delicious every time.
But no matter how well you cook shit, it's still going to be shit.
Now, just because they are mean little fuckers and know how much it grinds my gears, my husband and sons will sometimes bite into an ear of Hahn's delicious summer sweetness and tell me, "It's starchy."
But I know better.
Boiled, roasted, microwaved, on the cob, off the cob, in the pot 9 days old -- Hahn's corn is so perfect you simply can't fuck it up. You don't even have to cook it. Even raw it is sweet, tender and juicy.
There's no magic to it.
It's simply that good.
