Kornlet Soup
1 can kornlet 1 tablespoon chopped onion 1 pint cold water 4 tablespoons flour 1 quart milk, scalded 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 4 tablespoons butter Few grains pepper Cook kornlet in cold water twenty minutes; rub through a sieve, and add milk. Fry butter and onion three minutes; remove onion, add flour, salt, and pepper, and stir into boiling soup.
A cream-of-corn soup built on a vanished convenience product. The only real obstacle is the first ingredient; everything else is standard roux-thickened milk soup.
- KornletA trademarked canned pulp of scraped green (immature) sweet corn, sold in the United States in the early twentieth century and long discontinued. The nearest stand-in is the pulp of 4-6 ears of fresh sweet corn, scraped from the cob with the back of a knife so the kernel skins stay behind, or about 2 cups of canned cream-style corn.
- Scale of a canThe recipe says only "1 can," and no size is given. About 2 cups of corn pulp is a reasonable working amount against the pint of water and quart of milk.
- SievingWith fresh scraped corn the pulp goes through a fine sieve easily after its twenty minutes of cooking. With canned corn, a short blitz in a blender before sieving saves effort; press hard on the solids and discard the hulls.
- The rouxButter and flour want a minute or two of cooking together before they meet the liquid, or the soup tastes pasty. The onion is fried only for flavour and lifted out, so a coarse chop is easier to retrieve than a fine one.
- Adding the thickeningThe soup must be at a boil when the roux goes in, and it needs steady whisking for a minute or two afterward to thicken without lumps. Once thickened, drop to a bare simmer; a milk soup at a rolling boil will catch on the bottom of the pan.
- Scalding the milkHeating the milk to just below boiling before it joins the corn was standard practice with unhomogenised milk and still helps the soup come together quickly. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skim will taste thin.
- Seasoning and yieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, or six generous cups, serving four to six. Salt at 1 1/2 teaspoons is a starting point for a soup of this volume; taste at the end, and a little sugar helps if the corn is not at its sweetest.
Kornlet was a branded canned corn pulp of the sort that filled American pantries around 1900, when commercial canning was expanding fast and cookery writers cheerfully wrote proprietary products straight into their ingredient lists. The appeal was the phrase "green corn" -- sweet corn taken young and scraped rather than cut, so what went into the tin was milky pulp instead of whole kernels, giving a creaminess that whole-kernel corn cannot. Recipes like this one belong to the great family of American milk-and-roux soups, the same construction as oyster, celery and potato bisques of the period, in which a vegetable puree is bound with a butter-and-flour thickening and stretched with scalded milk. That the book names a trademark without explanation is a useful reminder of how quickly such names go stale: the technique survives, the tin does not.