Recipes for Health: Corn

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

When I was growing up in Connecticut, corn was on the table every summer night. “It’s a short season,” my father would say, passing around the platter for the fourth time. My mother would steam the ears in a huge canner and heap them onto a big kitchen towel on a platter, then wrap the towel around them to keep them warm. She might also make a big platter of ripe beefsteak tomatoes and meat of some kind. But when fresh corn was on the menu, we hardly noticed anything else. Our family of six could go through two dozen ears at a sitting.

These days, corn is bred to be sweet, and the taste depends less than it once did on the perfect moment for harvest and getting it to your plate shortly thereafter. Some say the new hybrid sweet corn will never taste as sweet as the old-fashioned corn of my childhood, but I’m not sure how much I really mind. Sweet corn is still pretty wonderful, and summer is the season for it.

Corn is a grain that we treat like a vegetable when we eat it fresh, on or off the cob. It should only be cooked for four or five minutes, and the sooner after you buy it, the better. Steaming is the easiest way to cook corn on the cob.

Corn is a good source of several nutrients, including thiamin (vitamin B1), pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), folate, dietary fiber, vitamin C, phosphorus and manganese. A cup of corn supplies 19 percent of the recommended daily dose of folate and about a quarter of daily value for thiamin.

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/health/series/recipes_for_health/corn/index.html