Vegetables and How I Cook Them: Corn

At the start of my sophomore year in college, I brought a friend to my family home. It was early fall, when tomatoes and corn are at their best. We stopped by for lunch, and my mom made BLTs, green salad, and corn on the cob. As the bacon was frying she asked me to get six ears of corn and three tomato “slicers.” My friend assumed she was talking about from the refrigerator and scanned the shelves.

“Oh, no. From the garden,” I said. A blank stare was his response.

He was from Chicago (actually Deerfield, a northern suburb of Chicago, but he always just said “Chicago”). Despite the locale, I’m pretty sure he had outside space where he grew up, but they clearly hadn’t had a garden.