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Succotash Soup
String and cut the string beans into inch lengths, then shred each inch into thin strips. Grate the kernels from six ears of corn, and boil the corn-cobs twenty minutes in a quart of cleared beef stock. Take the cobs from the stock and add the grated corn and shredded beans. Boil for twenty-five minutes. Make a pint of tomato sauce, thickened and seasoned as usual, and pour the stock containing the corn and beans upon this. Season to taste, and serve very hot, without straining. This soup can be made in winter from canned corn and string beans.
A late nineteenth-century vegetable soup built on the old trick of simmering stripped corn cobs to draw out their starch and sweetness. It comes together in under an hour, and the only real decision is how finely you shred the beans.
- The cobs are the pointBoiling the bare cobs in the stock for twenty minutes extracts starch and corn sugar that the kernels alone will not give. Do not skip it if you are using fresh corn; it is what makes the soup taste of more than its parts.
- Bean quantity is not givenThe original never states how many string beans to use. Roughly 1/2 lb for the quart of stock keeps the balance with six ears of corn; go heavier if you want it closer to a stew.
- Shredding the beansCutting each inch-length lengthwise into thin strips may have been meant to match the fineness of the grated corn, though the recipe does not say why. Ordinary sliced rounds will taste the same but look coarse.
- Grating the cornGrating rather than cutting the kernels releases the milky interior and leaves the tough hulls behind on the cob. Use the coarse side of a box grater over a bowl, or run a knife down each row and scrape with the back of the blade.
- Cooking time on the beansTwenty-five minutes of boiling will leave the beans olive-drab and soft. Fifteen minutes at a simmer is enough for both corn and shredded beans if you want them green and with some bite.
- "Cleared beef stock"This means stock that has been clarified, or at least strained and skimmed of fat — the soup is served unstrained, so anything cloudy or greasy shows. A good unsalted beef broth works; season only at the end, since the tomato sauce is already seasoned.
- Tomato sauce, as they meant it"Thickened and seasoned as usual" most likely points to a period tomato sauce: stewed tomatoes thickened with a butter-and-flour roux and seasoned with onion, salt and pepper. A pint of plain canned tomato pur\the the closest quick substitute when loosened with a little stock; a jarred Italian pasta sauce will push the flavour somewhere else entirely.
- Canned and frozen versionsThe winter note holds. Two cups of frozen corn and 1/2 lb frozen cut green beans need only about eight minutes in the stock, and with no cobs to simmer you may want a little extra body — a spoonful of cornmeal or a puréed ladle of the soup covers it.
- YieldA quart of stock and a pint of sauce is six cups of liquid before the vegetables go in, so allow roughly six to seven cups of finished soup after some reduction: four to six servings as a first course.
Succotash is one of the oldest borrowed dishes in the American kitchen — the name descends from a Narragansett word usually given as msickquatash, referring to boiled corn kernels, and the corn-and-bean pairing was long established in Native agriculture before English colonists adopted it. By the later nineteenth century succotash was as often made with whatever beans were at hand as with limas, and cooks were busy translating familiar dishes into soup form. The instruction to simmer the stripped cobs is a frugal habit that has largely vanished from home kitchens, and the closing line about canned corn and string beans shows how canned goods let a late-summer dish be made in winter.