Hmongs Enjoy Eating American Corn and Doughnuts Are Adopted, Traditions Endure - and the Search for Purple Rice Goes on Series: NEW ASIAN CUISINES IN AMERICA. Part 1 of a Series

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WHILE exotic, Far East dishes - fragrant with lemongrass, ginger, and coriander - intrigue mainstream America, Laotians new to the United States are becoming enamored of an all-American vegetable: corn on the cob.

"My mother grows corn in her garden," says Ly Kue, a Hmong social worker from Laos. "When it is fresh from the fields, we cook a lot in a big pot and put it all on the table to make a real feast of it with plenty of butter," she says.

There are some 15,000 Southeast Asian immigrants living in Rhode Island today, 2,500 of them Hmong. All but a handful of these Asian immigrants - Vietnamese and Cambodians, too - arrived in the late '70s, at the close of …