A Taste of Summer

Corn Suppers

Fritz and Tim Kate are practical, hardworking Midwesterners. They raised a family, keep a neat home, and perhaps most impressively, tend a huge backyard garden that for years has flourished in the unforgiving Oklahoma red clay. For me, much of the Kates' mystique comes from imagining them as the very embodiment of the vast Ohio prairie communities in which they grew up. But beyond their Midwestern sensibilities, the Kates also define for me hot Southwestern summertimes -- the long August evenings of my youth. As children, my sister Katherine and I looked forward to those rare times when Mom and Dad would venture off alone somewhere and leave us in the solid, dependable care of Fritz and Tim.

At the Kates, Katherine and I got to share a room, a prim, perfect space with white wood accents, neat gathered curtains, and a bookshelf outlining the ceiling space like proud Victorian crown molding. It was a magical bookshelf lined meticulously with National Geographic magazines. Spine after golden spine called to us, and Katherine and I would lie on our backs atop Tim's crisply pressed sheets and flip the magazine's pages, adventuring to dark, faraway places until we fell fast asleep. In the Kates' kitchen, there was always activity, even if Tim was momentarily occupied elsewhere in the house or Fritz was out working in the yard. There were tomatoes ripening in windowsills, pots of produce stewing on the stove, peas longing to be snapped, and gleaming Ball jars waiting to be filled and stored. There was also always homemade tomato juice on hand, big glassfuls of which we eagerly slurped down every chance we got.

Unlike our square, suburban yard, the Kates' corner lot seemed immense. The garden covered well over a third of it, bearing tomatoes and pole beans, flowers and beets, shell peas and summer squash, and row after soaring row of sweet corn. For our annual family pilgrimages to New Mexico, and several other times throughout the year, Fritz and Tim graciously shared with us a box containing their most recent harvest, but the generous gesture that has come to define the Kates is known as the "Corn Supper."

For several weeks in late July and early August, Fritz and Tim treat friends and neighbors to a celebration of summer. Night after night folks gather in their back yard before sundown, opening the evening with cocktails before moving on to a veritable feast reaped almost entirely from their garden. The meat of the meal is grilled chicken slathered with a tart homemade barbecue sauce, but the real bulk of the feast has been coaxed from the garden. Platter after platter of ruby, vine-ripened tomatoes speckled with herb garden basil entice guests to the table where they then discover bright pickled beets and tiny new potato salad with hard boiled eggs and celery occupying deep, well-like bowls. Pale green cucumbers and feathery dill bob in a vinegar marinade laced with sweet onions, and torpedoes of buttered Parmesan-garlic bread crusted with fresh marjoram and oregano disappear before they cool. The star of the supper, indeed the evening's raison d'être, is the Kates' sweet corn. Fritz's plump ears bear but a whisper of store-bought corn's vivid yellow tint, and Tim's care in the kitchen keeps the fat kernels full of sweet juice, a chin-soaking nectar that mingles divinely in the mouth with smooth, salt-tinged butter.

In their characteristic no-nonsense fashion, the Kates might modestly characterize their annual Corn Suppers as "business as usual." But as far as I'm concerned, a single bite of their heavenly homegrown, handmade spread translates as a rare taste of shining culinary perfection.