If Mr. Armitage were to dine with the Servetus family any night this week

Drawing on earlier posts about my own American regional foodscapes and what we’d offer the man who really likes food if he happened by for supper, I’ll mention that this is what he’d get if he were here tonight, because it’s one of the meals I love most in the world.

The main course: sweet corn (as we call it, to distinguish it from field corn) cooked on the cob. We usually make 8 ears per adult at the table, depending on the size of the ear, because it will only be here for a few weeks, and then we have to eat what we were able to freeze of the rest of it, but we’re pretty serious gluttons because we only eat it off the cob when we can make it according to the recipe below. No grilled sweet corn for the Servetus family, or even worse: ears purchased in the supermarket. Heresy! If Mr. Armitage told us he was coming, we’d pick just as many ears for him as he liked to eat. (That number is the kind of thing folks around here know.) If he didn’t want to eat it on the cob, I bet my mom would even slice it off for him, though to me that reduces the fun of getting the butter all over your cheeks when you eat it. (Maybe he wouldn’t even want any! For example, in my experience, this is kind of hard sell dish for Germans, because they don’t think of Mais as a warm main dish food — mainly as something to scatter cold over a salad or a pizza.)

Recipe: after you’ve sliced your tomatoes and sausage (see below) and every other part of the meal is ready to go, fill your biggest kettle with water and turn it on to boil. (If more than four are present you may need two kettles.) Set the table. When the water is almost boiling, go out the back door to the garden, flailing with your arms to ward off mosquitoes. Remind yourself that the compost needs stirring. Pick your way down a couple different rows of sweet corn, swatting at the bugs and making sure that you have some really ripe pieces for dad and some just barely ripe pieces for mom and yourself. (The Servetus parents time the planting so it doesn’t all ripen simultaneously.) Pause to look at the dragonfly zooming past and get bitten by a mosquito. Realize how annoyed you are that you forgot to put on long pants. Sit outside on the stoop and shuck the corn as quickly as possible. Go back in the back door; by now the lid(s) should be rattling wildly on the kettle(s). We don’t put anything in the water except the corn (some people put sugar, but if you are picking the corn as the water is boiling, the sugar in it won’t have converted to starch yet when you cook it, so it will be more than sweet enough on its own). Cook until just tender, usually no more than 3 minutes if the water is really boiling hard. I suggest taking out two ears per person for a starter portion, draining the rest and leaving it in the kettle so that the corn will stay warm. It will keep cooking for awhile even after you drain it so make sure not to overcook. 

Serving tips: Put salt, pepper and butter that you let soften slightly in advance on the table for each to take as s/he pleases. I like just butter, but my family eats salted butter. Listen to your parents reminisce about how much better the meal was when they were eating it with the butter they churned themselves, which they haven’t done since at least 1959, and which you can bet they bitterly complained about at the time. Debate vociferously whether it is better to chew a straight row down the ear, or in repeating circles, and about whether it is more polite to butter the corn with a knife or just plop down a square of it on your plate and roll the ear in it. Decide these are both adiaphora, but agree that people who need those little corn skewers inserted into the side of their ear of corn are wimps. Make sure everyone has either a cloth napkin or a lot of paper toweling available for cleanup. Pile the debris back on the platter. Youngest present takes the gnawed-clean ears out to the compost, not neglecting to pick up the husks as s/he goes. 

We always eat this with one particular vegetable side dish: tomato slices prepared from tomatoes from our garden.

Recipe: This is really easy. Pick ripe tomatoes, allowing them to sit on the kitchen counter for a day if necessary next to other almost ready tomatoes. This dish is best, though, if you use a nice juicy tomato variety rather than something like a Roma, which has been bred for more meat and less juice. Plus points for heirloom tomatoes, though my parents are not into that and just buy seedling plants from a nursery and put them in. Slice in thick slices with a serrated knife and lay flat on a platter. My grandparents and parents like granulated sugar sprinkled over the tomatoes but over the years I’ve convinced them to serve the slices unseasoned so they can put sugar on theirs and I can put pepper on mine. Obviously if you’ve lived in Europe you know these are also great with balsamico and oil, but I would never dare put that on the table here! When these are gone put the empty platter in a safe place so that you can slurp up the juices while you’re cleaning up the kitchen after the meal. 

And for protein, to keep up those Porter muscles, or as my mom would say, so you have something that will stick to your ribs: as many slices as he’d like of venison summer sausage. We eat a lot of venison because my dad and brother both usually get multiple crop damage permits, and because we’re not in extreme Up North, most of the deer they harvest are eating field corn, so the taste is still definitely lean and gamy, but not so strong as the venison from extreme Up North. This means our sausage is not so fatty because we don’t have to cut it with an overwhelming proportion of fatty pork (the usual choice around here) or beef (the Servetus family preference) to make it edible. I won’t explain how to make sausage here except to note that like most people of central European descent we prefer a relatively finely ground meat grain and lots of pepper and mustard seed in ours, but not so much that you can’t taste the venison! Our preference is also not for a true summer sausage (i.e., one that can survive without refrigeration) but a moister variety that has to be kept frozen or refrigerated after smoking.

If we happen to have some handy or leftover, my mom might also put some fresh curd on the table with this meal. Sometimes if she has to go out in the morning on Saturdays she buys some from the cheese factory where her father use to sell his milk. We all love it! Frankly, though, by evening fresh curd has lost its squeak, and we would almost never eat this meal for dinner as we don’t consider it filling enough. (Also because sometimes more corn is ripe than we can eat and then we freeze it right away, and the heat from blanching is less oppressive in the evenings than during the afternoon.) This is an exclusive supper offering.

If we have any room left after gorging on all this bounty, and my dad remembered to stop off at a truck stand, we might have slices of extremely ripe musk melon or canteloupe for dessert. We like it so ripe that if you waited until tomorrow to eat it, it would be spoiled.  I think it comes from Kentucky or somewhere. This is the only part of this quintessential Servetus family August meal we don’t produce ourselves — you can grow a melon up here but it’s a pain and they are just starting to get ripe now. Melons are really vulnerable to early freezes. If my dad is going to put that much effort into growing something he’d rather it be pumpkins — he’s got a 300 pounder out there on the vine now, and my nieces are already jumping up and down to see how much bigger it can get, because they’ve seen a picture of their daddy as a five-year-old sitting inside a pumpkin that grandpa grew.

I am sure I’m channeling all this emotion about my hometown at the moment because I have to start my drive back South tomorrow, and because emotions have been running high for most of the summer. I’ve never been really attached to my hometown; I left when I graduated from high school and I never really looked back. And yet it all seems strangely beautiful to me at the moment.

“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

~ by Servetus on August 18, 2010.