Corn day is a ritual event at our house – bigger than the 4th of July. More unavoidable than weeding the garden or picking rock, everyone is called into service. When you freeze corn, there are so many steps to the process that you need a small army. Our corn pickers, otherwise known as Dave and me, head out at the crack of dawn, and we fill the bed of our little pickup truck exactly three-quarters full. We have our measurements down to an exact science within a 5-gallon bucket or two. Then we drive the haul into our yard and back it up into the shade at the edge of a circle of chairs and buckets. No one is ever there waiting for us. Our huskers, otherwise known as the kids and the cousins, are loiterers and renegades by nature, so we have to extract them from the house, yelling, “It’s past time to be messing around with things like breakfast. Let’s get this show on the road!” I give them until high noon to get the whole pile husked. The deadline is arbitrary, but it is traditional, so we consider it ironclad.
Frankly, the huskers need a deadline. They sit in the circle telling stories, playing games, eating the corn, complaining about de-silking the ears and whine-whine-whining like their life is hard. It takes a bit of tough love and a specialized vocabulary to build forward momentum with such a crew, but once the husked corn finally starts rolling in at a good clip, we pull some of the kids and grown-ups out of the husking ring to set up an assembly line of washers, boilers, icers, cutters and baggers. No one is exempt. Even my father-in-law, who I will refer to by his official title of Grandpa, joins the fray.
Last year, Grandpa was recruited into the corn line as usual, and at 88 years old, he husked and cut corn all day. He was a trooper, and he didn’t complain, even though we made him eat cardboard pizza for lunch. Pizza on corn day is also a tradition. Of course, we paid him. We paid him in corn. Everyone on the line gets paid in corn. Unfortunately, we put Grandpa’s share in our freezer with the intention of running it over to him once it was frozen. If I was paid a dollar for all my intentions to do something tomorrow, we could buy another farm. For a month, I thought about that corn every time I opened the freezer. “I really need to get that to him,” I’d say, but it was at least seven months before I got around to actually grabbing a box to load it in, and by then, well, we’d eaten all of Grandpa’s corn. All of it. We’d somehow gone through all of ours too, so I was without recourse. By the rules of culinary farm snobitude, we do not buy frozen corn from the store any more than we buy someone else’s beef, so I had nothing to give Grandpa. Not a kernel.
When this year rolled around, I swore Grandpa would get his due. The first bags off the line were his. I counted them out. I labeled them. I wouldn’t let anyone else even look at them until his stash was secured. Then I ran it to the freezer and roped off a special section for the sacred corn to freeze in. I even called him right after only the fifth time that I meant to. “Dad,” I said, “I have your corn to bring over. And I am so sorry that you never got last year’s. I’ve felt bad about it all year.”
“It’s alright,” Grandpa said, “I’ve been eating up all the old stuff that I still have in the freezer. The other day, I ate a bag from 2016.”
“2016?” I asked. “Wasn’t it freezer burned?” For all of you who are too lazy to do the math, that’s 6-year-old corn.
“I don’t know,” he said, “tasted fine to me. Course, have I told you how I cook my corn? I simmer it on the stovetop in milk, then I salt and pepper it. Oh, and then I cover it in butter.”
Grandpa often says that he could eat a board if it was covered in butter, and that is the real topic of this article: butter. It is a subject my father-in-law and I are in complete and entire agreement upon. I don’t take butter’s cubed perfection for granted because I myself am a survivor of the margarine years. I grew up during dark times when everyone thought margarine was a health food. Strangely, we didn’t call margarine “margarine” at my house; we called it butter, so I didn’t fully realize what was being foisted upon me. I vaguely remember hearing about “real butter” being served on holidays, like the holidays somehow justified the sin of having excess joy, but the difference between butter and real butter was always murky in my mind. I feel a little betrayed to this day because my mom was a dairyman’s daughter, and she was holding out on me. Somewhere in my teenage years, I woke up to the fact that margarine wasn’t butter, and butter – real butter – made everything better. Cookies. Popcorn. Fresh homemade bread.
I have never looked back. If there is still margarine being sold in stores, I know nothing about it. I have erased its existence from my mind. If I run out of butter, I make more out of cream. If I run out of cream, I head to the store, no matter the time of night or day. It’s a rare day indeed, though, that I come up short. During COVID-19? I didn’t run out of butter. Considering the shortages in the supply chain, that logically means we either rationed it like gold or I habitually store enough butter in my outside fridge to frost Alaska with. I’ll leave you to decide. But if you ever need some really nice buttery cookies, come on over, and we’ll get some in the oven. Better yet, come over on corn day. We’ll put you in the Coleman production line and let you earn a little bit of buttered heaven for yourself.
