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THE ONLY TIME I ever bought fresh corn from the back of a truck, somewhere along Sunland Boulevard in Sunland, California, it turned out to be feed corn. This was a fact I didn’t realize until I placed a platter of the boiled ears on my dining room table, and a guest asked whether I’d noticed that the kernels looked like rotten teeth. I guess I figured that corn of the nongrocery-store variety just looked less than perfect. After one bite, however, I realized it had the flavor and texture of cardboard.
When I tell this story to Adam Sappington, chef and owner of the Country Cat Dinnerhouse in Southeast Portland, he laughs. “The only way I got corn when I was a kid was from the backs of trucks,” he says. “I grew up in the Missouri Corn Belt. The farmers would drive their pickups onto the ball field, put the camper down, and we’d go to town.”
The type of corn Sappington recalls most fondly from those days went by the name Peaches and Cream. “It was really sweet, with big white and yellow kernels,” he says. In Oregon, he was able to find it through Your Kitchen Garden Farm in Canby. Sauvie Island Organics also has provided him with a seemingly endless supply of other sweet varieties. “The first corn they harvest for us in July and August is called Bodacious, which is a little baby corn.” Come September, there will be more, with white or yellow or multicolored kernels and names like Sugar Buns and Silver Queen.
“I think one of the reasons I like their corn so much is that it’s grown on a floodplain, where the soil is loose and sandy, like in Missouri,” Sappington says. “It has characteristics you can’t get in other corn, like juicy, big, tight kernels.”
Sappington loves to use Sauvie Island’s harvest to make succotash, a mélange of corn and shell beans that he enriches with bacon, heavy cream, and chanterelles. It’s a heady dish that dresses corn in the culinary equivalent of a king’s robes.
Sometimes, though, I’m feeling more pauper than prince, and I want corn that’s as naked as can be—which is why I usually slice the kernels off, grab some ripe tomatoes and basil from my (neighbor’s) garden, and give it all a quick toss with oil and lemon juice. And since I now know what kind of corn to look for, it won’t draw the questioning eyes of my guests.
