Saturday's Sweet Corn Satisfies Like Never Before.
EMWTTSFM With Super Sweet Creamed Corn
Food Review by Gary Gardiner
If you’ve been reading the Monday edition of the Westerville News with the Eating My Way Through The Saturday Farmers Market (EMWTTSFM) food review, you’ve read about my introduction to hybrid sweet corn fresh from the stalk.
It was a radical departure from the corn of my youth, where I’m guessing the corn that made it to my country boy table was the same variety, or close to the same, as that which was fed to cattle, chickens, and pigs.
I don’t remember ever exclaiming how great the corn tasted, remarking how sweet it tasted, and asking what the variety was, so I could ask for it when shopping with my mom. Most of the corn I ate wasn’t on the cob. It was made into something different.
Creamed corn was a staple in the diet of my youth.
The milk for the creamed corn came from Hartman’s Dairy, just a couple of miles down the road. It arrived twice a week. The glass bottles with a dairy cow logo just beneath the farm name were left on the shady side of the house, out of the Florida sun.
My instructions were to gently carry the bottles to the refrigerator so the cream setting at the top wouldn’t get mixed in with the milk. It was a benefit granted to my father for his coffee, a reward for having survived the war, where coffee was foul and never with cream. This was long before homogenized milk became a thing. A thing that profited dairy farmers and bottlers but angered my father, who had to do without fresh cream.
I now have an abundance of corn from the Saturday market. Corn that tastes great without being cooked, but better if quickly boiled and slathered in butter. I miss creamed corn.
The cream corn I now make is more luxurious than that of my youth. First, I get to start with sweet corn, not field corn, and I use whipping cream instead of milk. It’s an homage to my father and the cream in his coffee.
All the other ingredients are similar to any cream corn recipe you can find in Joy of Cooking or on a Google search. Salt, pepper, and flour. It’s up to you if you want to add sugar. I don’t think it’s required, as the corn from Rhoad’s Farm and Yoder’s is super sweet. I do add some Parmesan cheese to mine just to accent the sweetness.
Add fresh tomatoes and bread & butter pickles as sides for the corn and pan-fried smoked sausage, and you’ll think you’re sitting at a north Florida farmhouse listening to toads and frogs and crickets and grasshoppers and mockingbirds confusing the air. Only sweeter.
The Evolution of Sweet Corn
Sweet corn has changed dramatically over the past century. In the 1840s, Stowell’s Evergreen set the standard as a white canning corn. By the late 1800s, Country Gentleman offered a creamy white “shoepeg” alternative.
In 1902, Burpee introduced Golden Bantam, the first widely popular yellow corn, followed in the 1930s by the higher-yielding Golden Cross Bantam hybrid. By the 1940s and ’50s, growers turned to dependable hybrids such as Seneca Chief and Iochief, though all lost their sweetness soon after picking.
That changed in the mid-1960s with Silver Queen, a sugar-enhanced variety that held its flavor far longer, marking the beginning of modern sweet corn.
The Green Grape Report
Food Review by Gary Gardiner
Kroger - Maxtown
Brand - Green grapes from California.
Price - $1.77 a pound. Best price of the season for bagged grapes.
Appearance - Bright color with few flaws.
Size - Smaller than last week’s choice. The grapes weighed an average of 7.4 grams. The average length measured from ten grapes is 24mm, with an average diameter of 22mm.
Crispiness - Crisp with a thin skin
Taste - Much sweeter. Measured at 24% sugar.
PLU Code - Kroger branded.
The Review
If you like green grapes, then this is the time of the year when life is great. California grapes are plentiful, reasonably large, sweeter, and firmer than they were in the last two months. It takes only a few seconds to select the slightly more than two-pound bags of grapes, confident of their flavor and sweetness. They are uniform in size, shape, and appearance. Just pick a bag and go.
California grapes are now coming into their peak season, filling American markets through the summer and fall. As California harvests ripen, they’re also shipped south to Chile, where winter leaves grocery shelves without local fruit.
The trade runs both ways. Chile is the leading supplier of grapes to the Ohio market during the North American winter. Peru seems to be second to our market. Thanks to a free trade agreement that removed tariffs a decade ago, grapes now cross the equator in both directions with ease.
The Westerville News is a reader-supported publication by Gary Gardiner, a lifelong journalist who believes hyper-local reporting is the future of news. This publication focuses exclusively on Westerville—its local news, influence on Central Ohio, and how surrounding areas shape the community.
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