By Gregory Clark, July 30, 1921.
The corn-on-the-cob season is here; and, as usual, the souls of countless thousands of hungry but proper people are filled with perplexity.
It is a terrible thing to go into a restaurant and see great platters of beautiful golden corn and at the same time be afraid to order it for fear of your neighbors’ eyes.
It is too much to have to sit in a cafe and see some brave, courageous person across the aisle ecstatically sliding his face along the cob of corn, his eyes rolling dreamily, and melted butter dribbling down his chin; while you, over-civilized, hyper-socialized, are afraid to make a similar spectacle of yourself.
Thousands of people in Toronto alone, it is estimated, are either bringing their lunch downtown in a package or are lunching at home solely because this is the corn season. Their stomachs crave the corn, but their moral courage is not equal to eating it in public.
Cannot the medical officer of health or some other authority on eating issue a public announcement standardizing the eating of corn-on-the-cob, and thereby sanction it even for the most finicky?
A neat poster could be got out, in colors, showing with diagrams the proper way to hold the cob, whether one or two or three rows should be bitten at once, how far along the row the eater should go before coming up for air, and so on.
It seems as if corn was created to set at naught our most sacred table manners. A few years ago, some hostess, endeavoring to admit corn into the most conservative menus and at the same time to preserve the table manners, set a fashion of cutting the corn off the cob with the knife, to be then eaten with the fork, like peas. But treated this way corn loses all its charm, its savor.
To mock us, Nature has made corn-on-the-cob the most delicious and at the same time the awkwardest of foods. It is taboo to rest the elbow on the table. But on the best authority, it is stated that if you don’t rest both – both elbows on the table while eating corn, you get butter all over your necktie.
Then the cob is round. Two, or at most three rows are all that can be reached at one bite, yet one bite is not a fair mouthful. There fore, the eater must take two or three bites sideways. This manoeuvre constitutes one of the most absurd exercises ever required of the human face. When the mouth is opened, the eyes open with it, the eyebrows are raised, and the same muses which elevate the eyebrows cause the ears to move.
Nature has undoubtedly provided corn to prevent us taking ourselves too seriously.
Timid and proper people, of course, resign themselves to suffer when tempted by corn in public. Then they hasten home and have a private gorge on corn. At this season of the year, if you go to your back windows towards bed-time and look across the yards at the kitchen windows opposite, you will probably see half-a-dozen proper citizens indulging in an extra corn feed before bed, by way of reprisal for the day’s self-denial.
No new methods need be sought. There is only one way to eat corn, and someone high in the public esteem ought to do a great public service by going about to all the different restaurants and giving frank and lusty exhibitions of corn eating to set at rest the minds of the pure and proper.
An Englishman just arrived in Canada was horrified at the first corn-eating exhibition he saw. It appeared a heathen sort of practice. After observing for a moment, he decided to demonstrate an improvement.
He ordered corn, and ostentatiously commenced eating from – the end, as one eats asparagus.
History tells that he made slow work of it, cob and all. But with true British doggedness, he stuck to the end.
His case is a warning to corn reformers. He is buried in Halifax.
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