Sweet Corn

Sweet corn with plump, tightly packed kernels. Press one with a thumbnail and it should release milk — that is the whole test, and it is the difference between corn and cattle feed.

Boiled with salt and rubbed with lime and chilli is how most of Dubai eats it, and it is hard to improve on. Otherwise: grilled in the husk, the kernels stripped into a chaat, or cut off and folded through a pulao at the end.

Choose cobs with green, tight husks and a moist stem end. Dry, straw-coloured husks and a shrunken stem mean it was picked a while ago, and corn loses sugar by the hour after cutting.

Cook it the day it arrives if you can — sweet corn is one of the very few things where a day genuinely costs you flavour.

Keep it in the husk, in the fridge, until the moment you cook it. Two to three days at most.