Corn Soup
Stew two chickens, or if preferred, a knuckle of veal. Grate twelve ears of uncooked corn. When the meat is tender, lift it out of the broth and to the latter add the grated corn and a teaspoon of tapioca farina. Cook for half an hour, then add pepper, salt, a little chopped parsley and a hard-boiled egg chopped fine. Make a thickening of three tablespoons of flour and add five minutes before serving the soup.
A late-nineteenth-century chicken-and-corn soup that assumes a large stockpot and a cook who knows how much water to cover two birds with. The quantities are generous; scale down unless you are feeding a crowd.
- Grate the corn, don't cut itGrating raw ears against a box grater ruptures the kernels and releases the starchy milk, which is what thickens and sweetens the soup. Cutting kernels off whole gives you a much thinner, less creamy result. Twelve ears yields roughly 5 to 6 cups of pulp and juice.
- Two chickens is a lotStewing hens of the period were commonly in the 3 to 5 lb range; a knuckle of veal is the joint end of the leg, sold today as a veal shank or soup bone. One 4-5 lb chicken in about 4 quarts of water makes a manageable batch, roughly halving everything else.
- Tapioca farinaThis is tapioca flour or starch, the fine powder rather than the pearls. Modern tapioca starch works directly; a teaspoon in several quarts of broth is a very light body, more gloss than thickening.
- The flour thickening needs liquidThree tablespoons of dry flour tipped into hot soup will lump instantly. Whisk it smooth with cold water or a ladle of cooled broth first, then stir it in. Five minutes of simmering is the minimum to cook out the raw taste.
- Half an hour on the cornModern sweet corn is generally more tender than the varieties available in the late nineteenth century and needs 10 to 15 minutes at most. A full half hour dulls the flavour, though it does break the pulp down further if you want a thicker soup.
- The chickenThe recipe lifts the meat out and says nothing more about it. Skin and bone it, shred it, and return it to the pot at the end, or reserve it for another dish as the original evidently intended.
- YieldThe recipe never specifies how much water, so any yield is a guess; as written it is a large potful, easily a dozen servings. The chopped hard-boiled egg and parsley are added at the finish and are best scattered over each bowl rather than stirred in, where the egg breaks up.
Corn soups turn up throughout American cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s, usually in a green-corn version made only in late summer when ears could be grated raw. The technique of grating rather than cutting is often traced to Native American practice, though the line of transmission is not documented; the same grated pulp underlies corn pudding and the various "corn oysters" of the period. The choice offered between two chickens and a knuckle of veal reflects two familiar sources of gelatinous broth, and tapioca farina was one of several commercial starches available by this date.