Article by Debra Freeman and Fitz
Photos by Fitz
Lead photo: Silver Queen corn from Hanover Vegetable Farm in Ashland, Virginia
Article originally featured in the 013 edition of Southern Grit Magazine. To order a physical copy of the magazine visit HERE
On a recent trip to a farmers’ market in Chesapeake, Virginia this summer, almost every produce stall had a sign for sweet corn. And when asked if it was Silver Queen corn, almost every single vendor said yes. Except for one. A white haired and wrinkled man yelled out into the wind, “If anybody tells you they have Silver Queen corn, they’re lying! No one has Silver Queen corn anymore!” Who’s telling the truth?
Corn and assorted vegetables stall at the Chesapeake farmers market.
Let’s start with the origins of sweet corn. According to David Shields, Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina, Chair of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation and Head of the Slow Food Ark of Taste for the South, “sweet corn comes from mutations that caused three strains of maize to pack kernels with dextrin, a sugar, rather than starch.”
The first corn to mutate into sweet corn in North America was Papoon, a Native American strain of a white flint meal corn named by the Iroquois tribe. Shields notes that before Silver Queen corn, there were two types that were typically grown in gardens (sweet corn was typically grown as a garden crop) – Old Colony and Stowell’s Evergreen. Cross-bred corn varieties began to appear in significant numbers during the 1850s, and Stowell’s Evergreen was the favorite sweet corn for a century, although Country Gentleman Shoepeg deserves a notable mention.
When these other sweet corns ran up against Silver Queen in taste, they did not match up and became far less popular. In a Washington Post article, the sweet reign and origins of Silver Queen corn are traced back to the early 1960s, when Frank Blankenburg used Luther Hill corn, which was developed in New Jersey in 1902, as one of the parental lines.
Silver Queen quickly became famous for its sweetness through word of mouth, says Joseph J. Steinke, a Rutgers University horticulturist, and became the “main-selling sweet corn from south Jersey all the way to Florida.” Virginians took note of the corn and it became a well-known summer treat on the Eastern Shore.
However, there was a downside to the reigning monarch of corn. Its shelf life was remarkably short. The Hearn Kirkwood website (a private food distributor in Maryland, Virginia, and the Washington, DC area) mentions that new varieties of sweet corn stay sweet up to four weeks longer because they convert less starch to sugar. According to The Baltimore Sun, the conversion process from starch to sugar for Silver Queen ears, “begins as soon as they are plucked from the stalk. To rightly experience Silver Queen, you must eat it on the day it was picked.”
In an article by Barry Estabrook about genetically modified corn, Estabrook wrote that in the 1950s, John Laughman was able to cross-pollinate three varieties of corn to create a hybrid strain that remained sweeter for a longer period of time, which means the corn can stay on grocery store shelves much longer than heirloom varieties. In recent years, according to the State Department of Agriculture, Silver Queen sweet corn has fallen to more popular strains with a longer shelf life, such as Argent and White Magic. In addition, sugar enhanced sweet corn strains such as Bodacious, Incredible, and Kandy Corn also have surpassed Silver Queen.
Since profit tends to outweigh taste, farmers planted less Silver Queen corn in order to maximize their return, and the corn has become more challenging to find. As John Bouwkamp, associate professor of horticulture at the University of Maryland playfully commented in a Washington Post article, “only 5,000 acres of Silver Queen are planted in this area. But 10,000 are sold.”
There are still farmers who sell Silver Queen corn, many of which can be found at local farmers markets. Farm Chicks Produce in North Carolina, for example, exclusively plants it. And although Silver Queen corn isn’t the most readily available type of corn, everyone can agree that this summertime staple is worth the search.
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