LE ROY PENNYSAVER & NEWS - AUGUST 13, 2023 by Lynne Belluscio It’s sweet corn season and the LeRoy FarmMarket as well as some of the local farmers are selling local sweet corn. It should be available for a few weeks. Corn was one of the “three sisters” grown by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Indians. The corn seeds were planted in hills and the beans would be planted around the corn. The bean plants would climb up the corn stalks and squash plants would shade the ground. Corn was grown by Native Americans from South America to Canada. It is estimated that between 250 to 300 varieties of corn were being grown in the 15th century. Sweet corn appears to be a recent mutation. In 1779, when General George Washington ordered the Iroquois to be decimated because they had sided with the British, he ordered General Clinton and Sullivan to destroy all the orchards and to burn the fields of corn and to burn the granaries as well as the villages. But the soldiers discovered a different kind of corn. Unlike the hard “Indian Corn”, it was “Evergreen.” Lieutenant Richard Bagnal gathered some of the corn and took it back to Massachusetts and tried to plant it. It was called Papoon and had a red cob with eight rows of white kernels. The new corn wasn’t very popular. It appeared in seed catalogues as early as 1828, but it wasn’t until the introduction of Stowell’s Evergreen in the early 1850's that the idea of a sweet corn became popular. Since then, there have been many varieties of sweet corn, mainly because it is an open pollinated seed. Through the years there have been Dwarf Early Sugar for family use because its short stalks allowed it to be grown in a small area. Mammoth Sweet was popular because the huge ears were good for one meal. Black Mexican had white kernels in the milk stage but they turn jet black as the corn matures. Many of these early sweet corn varieties no longer exist or are only available through heirloom seed companies. “Howling Mob” was developed in 1906 by a farmer who said that the corn attracted a huge crowd every time he brought it to market. It is still available through a couple of small seed companies. In 1981, the Cornell Cooperative Extension published a 4-H Leaders booklet “The Heirloom Vegetable Garden.” Dr. Robert Becker, Dr. Roger Kline and I wrote short essays about many early vegetables. Joseph Harris, of Harris Seed Company was able to acquire heirloom seeds which were available to 4-H clubs. The gardens at Genesee Country Museum were planted with the heirloom seeds and the vegetables were prepared in the historic kitchens. The essay on sweet corn mentions that it was not until 1909 when Golden Bantam was introduced, that people thought that yellow corn was suitable for human consumption. Yellow corn was always considered “cow corn.” I included two recipes for sweet corn. One was an 1846 recipe for “Succatosh” from “Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book.” This common side dish of boiled beans and corn instructed the cook to, “Use two thirds corn and one third beans. After cooking until tender, add flour that has been made into to paste and stir it into the succotash. Then lay some butter in a dish, take it up into it, and add more salt if need be.” The recipe for corn pudding is excellent. “Grate two dozen ears of green corn – the sweet corn is the best, although field corn will answer; (No. Don’t use field corn!) Then carefully scrape the cobs, so as not to get the hulls off; put in about a quart of cold milk, three eggs, two tablespoons of sugar, and a teaspoon of salt; the consistency depending much on the state of the corn. Then bake.” Taken from “The Farmer’s Everyday Book” 1850. Personally I like a good corn chowder and there’s nothing like a good corn fritter, slathered with butter and some nice maple syrup. (Forget the imitation stuff.) For those who want to make the most of your sweet corn experience, corn cobs make an excellent jelly. The husks can be dried to make corn husk dolls and woven into floor mats. Dried cobs can be sawn into small “coins” and used on a checker board. And a few people might remember a pail of dry corn cobs in the out house. Sweet Corn
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