summer fest: a vintage look at fresh corn

I WAS TEMPTED TO POST A RECIPE FOR ETHANOL to celebrate Corn Week—Part 2 of our third annual Summer Fest recipe swap—but I don’t have the secrets to ethanol’s success figured out, sad to say. Rather than look forward, then, I’m looking back: with a vintage slideshow of our corn-filled American history, and a homey creamed corn that basically contains (you guessed it) mostly just cream and corn. The recipe’s as American and at least as old as the corn-motif Bennington porcelain pitcher (top) that lives here with me—sharing my view of acres of rolling cornfields.

First, a word about Summer Fest, which I co-founded in 2008: It’s a giant round-robin of sharing themed to a single garden-fresh ingredient each week. Get all the details and latest links below, just before the comments, and stock up on delicious ideas from around the web—or add your own.

I READ UP ON CREAMED CORN this week (as did many of my Summer Fest colleagues—see the links below), and found a lot of variations included cornstarch or flour as thickeners, sugar, and even Parmesan cheese or bacon or any manner of extras. Once I shucked the fresh-picked corn from down the road, I thought: I can’t do that to this beautiful stuff, and went the ultra-simple route. Even adding cream seemed like gilding the lily. But I did.Corn in Historical Imagery

MY VINTAGE PITCHER GOT ME THINKING how much a part of our heritage corn has been, and so I set off again to the Library of Congress. The show below includes a mere sampling of thousands of relics—from the Victorian era Corn Palace in South Dakota, above (its facade covered in 3,500 bushels of corn, or so the caption says) to a Seneca chief whose name translates as Corn Plant, to surprisingly social shucking-day images.

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