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Green Corn Soup
One large fowl, or four pounds veal (the knuckle or neck will do), put over fire in one gallon cold water without salt, cover tightly and simmer slowly till meat slips from the bones, not allowing it to boil to rags, as the meat will make a nice dish for breakfast or lunch, or even for dinner. Set aside with the meat a cup of the liquor; strain the soup to remove all bones and rags of meat; grate one dozen ears of green corn, scraping cobs to remove the heart of the kernel, add corn to soup, with salt, pepper, and a little parsley, and simmer slowly half an hour. Just before serving add a tablespoon flour beaten very thoroughly with a table-spoon butter. Serve hot. To serve chicken or veal, put broth (which was reserved) in a clean sauce-pan, beat one egg, a table-spoon butter and a teaspoon flour together very thoroughly, and add to the broth with salt, pepper, and a little chopped parsley. Arrange meat on dish, pour over dressing, boiling hot, and serve at once.
A two-in-one recipe typical of Buckeye Cookery: the stock becomes soup, the boiled meat becomes a second meal under an egg-thickened sauce. The corn is the point, so treat it accordingly.
- Grate, do not cutGrating the ears and then scraping the cobs releases the starchy milk that both thickens and flavors the soup. Kernels sliced off whole leave that behind and the result is thin and grassy. A box grater over a bowl, or the back of a knife after grating, does the job.
- "Green corn" means fresh sweet cornIt is corn at the milk stage, not a green-colored variety. A dozen ears yields roughly 5-6 cups of grated pulp; frozen kernels can substitute but should be pulsed briefly in a food processor to break them down.
- Fowl versus chickenA "large fowl" was an older laying hen, tough and gelatin-rich, which is why it simmers until the meat slips from the bone. A 5 lb roasting chicken will be done in about 1.5 hours; a veal knuckle or neck needs 2.5-3 hours.
- No salt at the startThe original is explicit: the meat goes into cold water "without salt," and salt appears only after the soup is strained. Season at the end.
- Half an hour is generousFifteen to twenty minutes at a bare simmer is enough; longer dulls the flavor and can scorch the starch on the pan bottom.
- The flour and butter finishA tablespoon of each worked together is a beurre manié, whisked in off a hard boil so it disperses without lumping. It will only lightly thicken this quantity of soup, which is the intent.
- The meat sauce contains a raw-ish eggOne egg beaten with butter and flour, then combined with boiling broth, needs to be cooked through over low heat while stirring, and must not boil hard or it will curdle. Bring it to 160F to set it safely.
- YieldServes 10 to 12, with the boiled meat feeding four or five separately.
Green corn soup belongs to the short late-summer window when sweet corn is at the milk stage, and it appears in Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in 1877) because that window was the whole reason to make it. The recipe's structure says as much about frugal Midwestern housekeeping as about corn. Nothing is wasted, the stock feeds the family at dinner and the spent fowl reappears at breakfast under a sauce, and the cook is told plainly not to boil the meat "to rags" because she will need it again. Grating and scraping the cob to get the "heart of the kernel" is a technique shared with corn puddings and the dish sometimes called corn oysters, and is generally traced to Native American practice with green corn, which colonists adopted early and thoroughly.