Why are there so many gadgets for eating corn?
Do people think their hands are going to fall off when they touch an ear of corn? Because that is the only explanation for the staggering number of products designed to help us eat it.
You can butter it with special knives or curved butter holders or even the Butter Boy, a cute little guy that holds your butter in place. And once you’re finally ready to eat the corn, you can put it on your corn-shaped plates and insert your corn prongs, little handles that are probably shaped like miniature ears of corn. If you eat it on the cob, you can put it in a corn-shaped grilling cage or a cornshaped microwave dish. If you want to take the kernels off, too, there are more than a dozen devices to help: razors that remove rows of kernels as though they were hairs, cutters that trap kernels in bubble-like compartments, tong-like implements that take off all the corn at once.
Or you could just use a knife to butter it, and hold the cob with your hands once it cools down a little bit.
It was in the late 19th-century Victorian era that upper-class people began to take notice of corn, and come up with more elaborate ways to prepare and serve it.
“Nothing went onto the Victorian table that wasn’t designed,” said Greenstein, who owns a number of that era’s two-tined forks used to hold corn — the predecessor to the plastic corn-shaped holders we see today. Typically, he said, the Victorians would cut kernels off the cob with metal scrapers. A corn holder that looks like a tiny ear of corn — with a blade to stick in the cob, like a whimsical little corn sword — was patented in the United States in1909, and evolved over the years, shifting to yellow plastic around the ’50s, Greenstein said. That’s when American kitchens got considerably kitschier — think novelty cookie jars — and postwar prosperity meant more consumer spending on household goods.
One 1977 patent for corn-shaped holders spelled out, in precise, stilted language, why we need corn holders.
“It is generally well known that many persons enjoy eating corn ‘on the cob,’ by holding the corn ear in the hands while the corn kennels are bitten off therefrom,” says the application for Larry Riedinger Jr. and George Spector’s “cornscrew.”
“When the corn is thus eaten, it must be hot, having been just removed from a pot of boiling water so that the ear is usually too hot for being comfortably held in the hands.”
In recent years, some manufacturers have reverted to a more minimalist look for their corn gadgets, which might have plain yellow handles that suggest corn without depicting it. Other gadgets have followed suit, such as the plain curved blade of Butter Once, a device Anne McMahon and her husband, Joe, both interior designers from Wilton, Conn., created together. It’s an alternative to other corn butterers, which can hold up to a whole stick, making them more wasteful.
But we don’t really need corn holders and scrapers and de-silkers. We can do these tasks with knives and our hands. Yes, freshly cooked corn is hot enough to scald — about 93 C straight out of the microwave after five minutes and about 65 C from a pot of boiling water. But that’s also too hot to put in your mouth. By the time the corn has cooled enough to eat, it’s also cool enough for your fingers.
In this Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up era, do we really have room for gadgets that can only be used on one type of vegetable — and a vegetable many only eat for a few months out of the year, at that? Somehow, there’s always an odd number of corn-shaped prongs. But corn strippers and holders make it through a kitchen purge because they’re small and whimsical. Look at the face of a pig-shaped corn holder — first patented in1937 — and tell me it doesn’t spark joy.