Silver Queen corn season in Baldwin County, Alabama, has loomed large in my mind as long as I can remember. As a kid I loved corn on the cob–I still do–and in our family we never, ever, ever, had that kind of corn on the cob that came pouring out of a white grocery freezer section bag. I remember thinking that it was probably very cosmopolitan to buy frozen, small, yellow, uniformly-sized hunks of corn from the grocery. And then I had some at a friend’s house. I was cured. I thought we’d had feed corn with dinner.
By the time I was 8 or 9, my maternal grandfather, Daddy Mac–recently retired from the dairy industry in Baldwin County–and my Nana had lived in town for many years. Still, on an early morning in early summer every year when I was young, a beat-up pickup truck would come tearing down their driveway carrying three farm workers and a metric ton of fresh picked corn. With one guy driving and two in the back, they’d get to the house, the guys in the truck bed would jump out and drag two enormous croaker sacks of corn into the garage. The driver would holler to Nana, who’d come out the kitchen door by then, “Mr. Julio said to bring Mr. McKibbon a little corn!”, and they would go flying back down the driveway in reverse, even faster than they’d come up it in the first place.
And you know what else? It didn’t matter what your plans had been that day, you weren’t going anywhere until all that corn was shucked, and most of it put up in the freezer.
Thinking back, Mr. Julio Corte’s corn came on big, fat, ears, far larger than anything at the regular farmer’s market or grocery store. I think it was actually Silver King, a variety I don’t know if anyone plants anymore.
In any case, the very most important thing about the corn for this recipe is that it be sweet and very fresh. The Peaches and Cream variety of bicolored corn can be very good and is available in our area later than the all-white varieties. The best way to tell if any corn is fresh is to pierce or pop a kernel with your thumbnail. The clearer the liquid, the fresher the corn. Corn sugars start to turn to starch as soon as corn is picked, and the resulting starch makes the corn liquid cloudy, and the corn is less tender and sweet. Old corn will have a white thick liquid inside the kernels, and fresh corn will have a more watery translucent liquid.
Even I get tired of corn on the cob eventually. Summer Corn Chowder is an excellent change of pace.
Summer Corn Chowder
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp fat--olive oil, bacon grease, butter, or a combo--up to you
- 1 large onion, finely diced
- 2 large carrots, scrubbed and finely diced
- 1 stalk celery, finely diced
- 1 small red bell pepper, cored, seeded, and finely diced
- 1 quart chicken stock
- 1/4 lb chopped ham, optional
- 2 medium russet potatoes, peeled and in ½ inch dice
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp ground black pepper
- 1/4 tsp cayenne, optional
- Kernels cut from 8-10 ears of fresh sweet white corn (approx. 4-5 cups)
- 1 cup heavy cream
- Good garnishes: fresh snipped chives, sliced scallions, crumbled bacon, sliced jalapenos, etc . . .
Instructions
- In a soup pot, sauté onion, carrot, celery, and bell pepper in fat over medium low heat until vegetables are wilted and onions are translucent. Stir in flour. Cook, stirring, for a couple of minutes. Pour in the chicken stock, stirring well to get up anything stuck to the bottom of the pot.
- Raise the heat to medium high and add the ham, potatoes, salt, pepper, and cayenne if using. Bring to a boil and turn heat to low. Simmer until a small knife easily pierces the potatoes all the way through. Using a hand held potato masher or a big wooden spoon, break up the potatoes a bit.
- Add the corn and simmer another 10 minutes. Stir in the cream and adjust seasoning. Serve hot, garnished as you like.
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