Kernels of truth
Anissa Helou overcame her childhood rules to savour the flavour of corn grilled outdoors
My most wonderful memory of eating corn on the street takes place in Rabat, Morocco. I noticed the vendor just as I was about to enter the Oudayat, a beautiful city within a city overlooking the Atlantic. The embers were burning right on the pavement and the vendor had the ears of corn grilling directly on them, with no metal grill in between.
I had never seen corn cooked this way, nor had I eaten it dipped in salted water after grilling but that ear of corn was better than any I had before. Totally scrumptious.
Corn is a universal street food. You see it everywhere. I found my favourite Turkish corn seller in Meram, a gorgeous public garden outside the Central Anatolian city of Konya. The vendor manned a large cart with two huge pots in which he boiled the corn.
In Beirut, where I grew up, I had to wait until I was a teenager to enjoy corn on the street. My mother’s reason for not allowing me, or my siblings, to eat on the street was that girls from good families could not be seen to be munching food on the street.
If I wanted to eat corn, or any other street food for that matter, I had to ask the vendor to wrap it and wait until I got home to have it. This didn’t matter with boiled corn but it completely spoiled grilled corn. The ear steamed in the paper and lost most of its crunch by the time I was able to eat it.
In Greece, I was surprised to see women corn vendors but the female touch didn’t seem to do any good. The grilled corn I had there was always dry and woody, and the ears were never salted. Maybe I was unlucky with my choice of vendors. |
