SWEETCORN

This really dates me, but I can remember when ‘corn on the cob’ was a fancy new vegetable. We’d had the canned stuff – I still like Green Giant – but once you could buy cobs, my mum got special long plates for them and little spears to push in each end. Because of this extravagance – who has plates for corn? – we ate it fairly regularly, doused in melted butter with lots of cracked black pepper on top. As you sank your teeth into a cob, the kernels popped, releasing sweet juices that mixed with the salty butter, making it seem like a vegetable that was delicious – and, with all that popping, still alive. Sweetness is the point of corn. Like fresh peas, the cobs need to be cooked quickly because as soon as they’re picked, the sugar starts to turn to starch. American friends tell me you should really run straight from the field where you’ve picked the corn to a pan of boiling water. It sounds like something out of – ‘Hey, catch the