“Green corn, we believe, is essentially a Maryland herb, for here only is it found in full perfection. Go south but a hundred leagues, and the best hotels will serve you corn that leaves a lingering feeling of imitation and inauthenticity. It is, as it were, a bit lousy. Go north, the same distance and you will find the green corn flabby and watery. Go west and it will disgust you utterly. In Maryland alone does it reach the flawless heights. Nowhere else is every ear perfect in curvature and specific gravity; nowhere else does every grain linger in the memory like a luscious chord from some immortal love song.
The taste for green corn, like that for the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, is not universally diffused among all races of men. The Scotchman, though he eats oats with gusto, regards corn as a feed rather than a food, and the German, busy with his rye bread and sauerbraten, has no time to master the difficult art of eating it. In all Paris, with its 10,000 restaurants, there is but one depot for green corn, and that one is kept by two homesick Americans. In London, Madrid, Rome and St. Petersburg an ear of corn would excite as much curiosity as a diamond of twice its bulk.
Certain misguided persons, in an effort to spread the cult of corn-on-the-cob, have recently devised ingenious hooks and prongs for holding it to the face. The idea of these inventors seems to be that the prejudice against corn, among many races, is due entirely to the risks of attending to the orthodox method of eating it. The new-fangled corn-hooks make the operations so simple that a novice can master in one lesson. When they are employed the fingers do not touch the ear at all. Instead it is safely impaled like a beetle on a pin and so all danger to the clothing, eyes and surrounding public is removed.
Despite the apparent refinement of this device, we are unable to approve it. To get the true flavor of green corn one must eat it in the manner followed for centuries by those epicurean eastern shoremen who are the acknowledged Raphaels of the art. If the fingers do not touch it how can one get the full measure of its electric warmth? With a steel prong piercing its vitals, how can it appeal to the imagination? With all danger of its sudden flight removed, where is the old romance? Away with all such mechanical impediments to poetic eating! As well kiss a pretty girl through a sieve.” – Baltimore Sun, 1909