If you cannot procure good butter, cook them in nice olive oil.
TO BOIL INDIAN CORN.—
Corn for boiling should be full grown, but young and tender, and the grains soft and milky. If its grains are becoming hard and yellow, it is too old for cooking. Strip the ears of their leaves and the silk. Put them into a large pot of boiling water, and boil it rather fast for half an hour or more, in proportion to its size and age. When done, take it up, drain it, dish it under a cover, or napkin, and serve it up hot. Before eating it, rub each ear with salt and pepper, and then spread it with butter. Epicures in corn consider it sweetest when eaten off the cob. And so it is; but before company few persons like to hold an ear of indian corn in their hands, and bite the grains off the cob with their teeth. Therefore, it is more frequently cut off the cob into a dish; mixed with salt, pepper, and butter, and helped with a spoon.
It is said that young green corn will boil sufficiently in ten minutes, (putting it, of course, into a pot of boiling water.) Try it.
Another way.—Having pulled off the silk, boil the corn without removing any but the outside leaves. With the leaves or husk on, it will require a longer time to cook, but is sweeter and more nutritious.
HOMINY.—
Hominy is white indian corn, shelled from the cob, divested of the outer skin by scalding in hot lye, and then winnowed and dried. It is perfectly white. Having washed it through two or three waters, pour boiling water on it; cover it, and let it soak all night, or for several hours. Then put it into a pot or sauce-pan, allow two quarts of water to each quart of hominy, and boil it till perfectly soft. Then drain it, put it into a deep dish, add some butter to it, and send it to table hot, (and uncovered,) to eat with any sort of meat; but particularly with corned beef or pork. What is left may be made next day into thick cakes, and fried in butter. To be very good, hominy should boil four or five hours.