Golden Bantam Corn

My brother Phil challenged my recollection about the sweet corn of our youth! He maintained, in a comment on my earlier post, that Saskatchewan had too short a growing season to produce a sweet corn, superior to that of the Wet Coast. The pianist, who grew up in the Qu'appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, swears that they lived on Beefsteak tomatoes and Golden Bantam corn, grown in the fall on their valley cottage garden. Her memory is as "sound as a dollar" used to be. Golden Bantam was the "piece de resistance" of the sweet corn family in those days of yore. It had a large stock with small irregularly rowed ears. It was no match in appearance for the modern hybrids, but so what! It was sweet and matured early and you could save the seed. It's now a Heritage Variety. Phil is probably right that my memory is a bit tricky. I am allowed, however, to be extravagant and embellish my anecdotes as part of my poetic licence. Everyone must know that sweet corn always tasted better when you were ten, than when you were seventy. No ten year old worried that his cob had irregular rows and was unusually small, since there was always more where that came from. One of the great joys of reverie is the pleasure one gets from revisiting history through rose colored glasses. "Precious Memories, How they Linger!" Probably sung by more artists than most any other song. The past just seems like yesterday!