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Corn Soup
1 pint of pressed corn, 2 even tablespoonfuls of flour, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 quart of milk, Yolks of two eggs.
Put the milk on to boil in a double boiler, add the corn cobs from which the corn has been removed. Cover and cook slowly a half hour. Remove the cobs, add the corn, cook twenty minutes more and press through a purée sieve. Rub the butter and flour together, add to the soup and stir continually until it thickens. Beat the yolks of the eggs, put them in the tureen, add gradually the hot soup, season and serve.
A cream-of-corn soup built on cob stock and finished with egg yolks rather than more cream. Two details carry it: the cobs, and the fact that the soup must not boil after the yolks go in.
- "Pressed corn"Corn cut and then scraped from the cob so the pulp and milky juice come away, leaving the tough hulls behind. A pint takes roughly 6 to 8 ears; stand each cob in a bowl, slit the kernel rows with a knife tip and press the pulp out with the back of the blade.
- Don't discard the cobsSimmering the stripped cobs in the milk is what gives the soup its base; the cobs carry starch and residual sugar that the scraped pulp alone does not. Snap them in half so they fit, and the recipe asks for the full half hour.
- The double boilerNot fussiness. Milk held over direct heat will scorch and catch. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir often, but the water bath is genuinely easier.
- The egg finish is the hingeThe yolks are a liaison, not a custard. Beat them in the tureen or a warmed bowl, then add the hot soup a ladleful at a time, whisking. Once the yolks are in, the soup must not return to the boil or it will curdle into grains.
- Egg safety, if it matters to your tableThe yolks reach only the temperature of the soup poured over them, which is below a hold that pasteurises. For very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised eaters, use pasteurised eggs or leave the liaison out and thicken with a little more flour.
- Cooking time for modern cornTwenty minutes suits the tougher corn the recipe assumes; modern sweet varieties soften a good deal sooner, and long cooking dulls the flavour. Judge by whether the pulp presses easily through the sieve.
- Sieve or blenderThe purée sieve catches whatever hull and fibre came away with the pulp. A blender followed by a fine strainer does the same job in less time; the straining still matters, since blending alone leaves grit.
- Seasoning and yieldThe recipe says only "season": salt and white pepper are the obvious reading, and some cooks of the period added a scrape of nutmeg. A quart of milk plus the corn gives roughly four to six servings as a first course.
Corn soups run deep in American cookery, and this one is squarely in the late-nineteenth-century style: a vegetable purée bound with roux and enriched with yolks, the same construction French cooking applied to peas, celery or asparagus. What is often said to mark it as American is the use of the cobs. Cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s repeatedly instruct the cook to simmer the stripped cobs in the milk or water, a thrifty trick generally traced to farm kitchens where corn arrived by the bushel in August and nothing edible was thrown away.