To listen to this post in French, click below
Some time ago, Walt at Another American in France, in his Kitchen Collection, posted a photo of fancy corn picks and it reminded me of the corn we had when I was a little girl.
In fact, no other family that I know of ate corn at the time. It was the sort of food that Gitta, my mother knew from her youth in Poland. She always said how difficult it was to find corn on the cob at the open air market near our flat. There would be very little and she’d buy as much as she could, because everyone at home just loved corn on the cob.
She always told us how people at the market asked her how she cooked the corn. They’d say things like
Le maïs, c’est pour les vaches ! Meaning, but corn is for cows, not people!
We had one of those big tall stewpots, that she only used to boil corn or lobsters, and she’d fill it up with salted water and pile up the cobs in it.
I remember that she kept some of the leaves husks and beards??? silks and put them in the pot to boil with the cobs. She said that it made the corn taste better. And then the mixture would boil for what seemed to be hours. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the corn.
In those days, corn would make the meal, and we just powdered the corn with salt, and then would have cheese and probably grapes, since this was traditionally in September. There were no fancy corn picks, and as the cobs were boiling hot, we’d use paper napkins to protect our fingers, instead of waiting for them to cool down.
Years later, when I spent two years in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, I found that people boiled their corn for a very short time, but then, the sweet corn that we had there was quite different from anything we have in this country.
Tasty memories indeed.
- The photo was taken by El Ramon, one of the best squaredcircle people on flickr
- You might want to have a look at my French blog, no need to understand a word of French for that, to see some of my turkey photos, but at your own risk, and if you can take some ugliness
Technorati Tags: cornseason, diving into the past, french audio
