Baby sweetcorn only really burned itself into the national conscience in Britain in the late 1990s, perhaps as late as 2003, November17th. Around the time that the British isles became acquainted with the café latte. Applications for the infantile vegetable sprung up almost immediately. Young girls could treat their Barbie Dolls to a Barbie-size KFC meal. Instead of corn on the cob, they could use the miniaturised version, with diddy French Fries (or Monaco Fries, Monaco being a small principality of France), and a much smaller bird species than the chicken, perhaps a hummingbird. Fingernail licking good.
Before the baby sweetcorn people just had to put up with the fully fledged corn on the cob (the only vegetable known to sound like a place name in Somerset), an alternative that would look very much out of place in a Thai dish. In fact, the only way of making the corn on the cob look right was to make gargantuan proportions of the other ingredients so that the corn looked more baby from the point of view of perspective.
The Editor
(www.tinybangtheories.com)