About a week ago, I tasted one of the most wonderful delights of summer. From our county’s Farmer’s Market, Susan had brought home a half-dozen ears of picked-this-morning corn. They were cooked as simply as possible: grilled, with butter, salt, and pepper. These ears were so deliciously sweet that, I swear, instead of corn, I tasted coconut, and toasted hazelnuts. These ears of corn were outrageous in their perfection, and I was happy, because I knew that our homegrown corn would be ripening soon, and that we’d enjoy days and days of the same delights.
However, there’s something I didn’t realize.
The variety of corn that I had tasted, despite being sold at the Farmer’s Market, was undoubtedly one of the modern-day super-sweet hybrids (not the hybrid feed-corn variety maligned in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but just as guilty, I suspect, of being genetically tampered-with). The variety that we grew this year, Golden Bantam, is an heirloom variety, suited for those who a) want to avoid GMOs and b) are tired of super-sweet corn, and just want that “real corn” flavor.
As someone who grew up on super-sweet corn– actually, on microwaved packets of Green Giant Extra-Sweet Niblets in Cream Sauce– the taste of real corn was a bit of a shock. I was disappointed in myself when I found that I didn’t like it as much.
The real disappointment came, however, in how the corn looked:
Those empty kernels are places were the corn wasn’t pollinated. A bit of corn pollen has to fall on ever tip of every strand of cornsilk– since every strand of cornsilk leads back down to a developing kernel– in order for the corn to fill out properly. They advise that you plant your corn in blocks, not rows, so that the pollen has a better overall chance of landing on the silk. “At the very least,” they advise, “plant your rows of corn 3 plants deep,” which is what I did, thinking that that would be enough.
There are definitely good-looking ears of corn out in the garden, but they’re not the golden and paradisaical crowning glories that I had been imagining.
It’s disappointing (and embarrassing? But I figured I ought to go ahead and tell my story.). I’ve definitely learned a few lessons about how to plant corn (in blocks!), and a very obvious lesson about which varieties of corn to plant (the kind you want to eat, not the kind you think you ought to grow).
I threw the ears out as a rare treat to Charley & Churchill, who, having no prior experience with corn or built-up expectations, chowed down with a pure and piggy joy.
