Awe Shucks…

Rarely will you find the good folks of rural America calling on psychiatrists or professional counselors to figure out who they are, why they are the way they are, or how to handle the latest farm malady. Instead, they turn to their own brand of rural therapy.

One came to mind just yesterday after purchasing and “processing” eight dozen ears of sweet corn from a local farm family.

You won’t find a much better way to solve the world’s problems than time in a lawn chair with a five-gallon bucket of sweet corn at the ready for shucking. Sweet corn season in the South is a hallowed time.

First, there’s an important distinction here. All corn isn’t equal.

Drive the rolling plains of Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, or Nebraska, and you’ll see commercial, or “field corn,” as far as the East is from the West. This corn has thousands of commercial purposes, but it’s just that — commercial. Cooking oil, makeup, livestock feed, candies, ethanol, and industrial starches are just a few examples. You could boil a few ears of commercial field corn for a picnic, and it might taste about as good as a cardboard box.

Somewhere, sometime years ago, some ingenious soul discovered and developed “sweet corn,” one of the crown jewels of Southern staples.

Whether it’s a 20-acre patch or five short rows in a backyard garden, every grower is loyal to his favorite varieties. Tantalizing names like Sundance, Golden Jubilee, Bodacious, and Kandy King. But there’s one variety my family has long placed at the epitome of them all — Peaches and Cream.

There are no words that adequately describe the palate’s sensation of the season’s first bite of Peaches and Cream corn on the cob picked a few hours earlier. Flavor. Texture. An audible “crunch.” I’ve seen my father mow across a freshly boiled cob of Peaches and Cream like a John Deere riding mower. The first bite hooks you. There’s no stopping until the cob is obliterated clean.

Pass me a plate of freshly shelled purple-hull peas and cornbread, fried okra, cold-sliced, vine-ripe tomatoes, and fresh sweet corn—all topped off with a warm peach cobbler—and I’ll show you a happy man. But first, you have to put the work in.

Each year, families eagerly await the ready notices from their favorite roadside vendors who labor through stifling June conditions as they hand-pick. The growers fill a pickup truck bed in no time. It’s time to “put up” sweet corn for the coming year. This usually happens by one of two methods.

The shucked sweet corn on the cob is stored in freezer bags and preserved in the deep freeze (some dedicate entire freezers to this purpose alone). Then, there’s a more laborious process of removing the kernels from the cob and “canning” in a pressure cooker. Depending on the volume, canning sweet corn is often a several-day process. At the end of it, quart jars are stored on shelves like so many trophies of the summer. Canned sweet corn is better than cotton candy.

But none of this happens without the shucking.

And shucking is both therapy and art.

There is a proper way to shuck an ear of corn.

There is a science to this natural wonder, too. Corn might be the world’s only commodity that can be accurately classified in three ways. Botanically, it is a fruit. Nutritionally, and in the culinary world, it’s a vegetable. Agriculturally, it’s a grain.

God protects this holy trinity food in green, leafy protection known as husks. Extending from every grain to the top of the ear are the silks, a kind of pollinating umbilical cord for each kernel. If you could count the number of silks in an ear of corn, you’d know the exact number of kernels. All silks extend and are exposed at the top of the husks in the tassel, where germination happens. Corn cross-pollinates. This is why you’ll fail every time planting a single row of corn. You need multiple rows and wind to germinate an ear of corn. Insect pollination is a bonus.

A veteran corn shucker can remove the husk in two pulls. Pinch from the top and pull, then grab the remaining husks and do likewise. A quick snap at the bottom removes the husk entirely. What’s left is a silky cob offering the most tedious phase of the art.

Veterans can likewise remove ninety percent of the silks with a “grab and twist” motion, gently pulling the silks away. Disregard for an easy hand leaves hundreds of broken silks. This leads to the final phase — “pinch and pull” using the thumb and crook of the index finger to remove each silk from the kernel. My dad was a stickler for this final phase. I can still hear him complaining about my silk jobs.

The art’s keenest practitioners can pull off this whole process in about 30 seconds. Our family of three could knock out a hundred ears in about an hour.

With a five-gallon bucket between my knees, my hands move on autopilot while my mind ponders the events of the day or life’s deepest questions. It’s quiet, it’s steady, and it’s saved me plenty of cash on a shrink.

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