In a pragmatic display of Yankee enthusiasm, we have put our native corn to every conceivable use. We eat it, of course, and we feed it to our animals, and we turn it into syrup to sweeten our soft drinks, into alcohol to spike our hard drinks, and into ethanol to run our engines. Corn is used in the manufacture of rayon, spray starch, shoe polish, soaps, plastics and dyes.

It's no wonder that corn also means something overused, what The American Heritage Dictionary calls "trite, dated, melodramatic or unduly sentimental."

Corn is anything but chic, right? Why, then, is corn at the table suddenly swank? Why is pure, sweet corn right off the cob just about the hottest thing since tiramisu? I've never been able to resist putting something with corn on my summer menus, and judging from what I see around me, I am not alone.

Chef's cookbooks all seem to have something smart with corn, too, and summer menus are about as corny as Kansas in August. Mario Batali's "Babbo Cookbook" (Clarkson Potter, 2002) offers "Charred Sweet Corn Fregula." Pasta, corn and olive oil meet chicken broth and Parmigiano-Reggiano. Heaven. Jerry Traunfeld's already classic "Herbfarm Cookbook" (Scribner, 2000) includes a formula for the magical elixir known as "Chanterelle and Corn Chowder with Basil." The list of three ingredients reads like poetry to me. Tom Douglas' "Seattle Kitchen" (HarperCollins, 2000) would be worth the cover price even if it contained nothing more than the secret to that sumptuous "Etta's Cornbread Pudding," which Tom likes to serve with pit-roasted salmon. Finally, like an exclamation point, Ron Feenie's "Lumiere" cookbook (Ten Speed, 2001) dishes up a recipe for "Sweet Corn Ice Cream," which is served with a warm chocolate cake and tastes as right as — well, corn on the cob at the county fair.

Perched in front of a television in a hotel room a few weeks ago with a hundred channels to choose from, my two kids, aged 8 and 12, stopped on the Food Network to watch a documentary about corn. They stayed there long enough to watch Michel Nischan, executive chef at Heartbeat in New York's W Hotel, make a dish of seared scallops with fresh corn succotash and sweet corn cream. He put corn kernels through a vegetable juicer to get a kind of corn juice and then gently stirred the liquid over medium heat until the starch, naturally present in the corn juice, thickened.

The restaurants at W hotels are bastions of corn chic-ness. At the W in Seattle, Earth & Ocean executive chef Johnathan Sundstrom makes a corn panna cotta that takes the stuff way out of Kansas and puts it in a kind of Oz. The smoother-than-cornsilk, custard-like appetizer wears a little panache of tiny corn sprouts, and a dollop of caviar sends it soaring. I first tried it when Sundstrom was cooking a benefit for the March of Dimes last year. This year, he has it on the menu.