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Chicken and Corn Soup
Take 2 quarts of the liquor in which a chicken has been boiled, add 1 pint of corn scraped from the cob, chopped, 1 tablespoonful of finely chopped onion and 1 scant teaspoonful of salt and simmer, closely covered, for an hour. Rub through a fine sieve and return to the fire. In a IO small saucepan melt 1 tablespoonful of butter, add 2 tablespoonfuls of flour and when mixed, 1 cupful of rich milk or cream. Add gradually a portion of the soup and when smooth turn into the larger kettle. Season to taste, sprinkle in 1 tablespoonful of very finely chopped parsley and serve.
A cream-of-corn soup built on chicken broth, thickened with a butter-and-flour roux and finished with parsley. The method is sound; only the units and a few habits need translating.
- The brothTwo quarts of chicken cooking liquor is the water a bird was boiled in, generally thinner and lighter in seasoning than commercial stock, though the recipe does not say how the fowl was cooked. If using boxed stock, choose low-sodium and hold back on the teaspoon of salt until the end.
- Scraped cornScraping rather than cutting the kernels releases the starchy milk from the cob, which is what gives the soup body. Cut the tops off the kernels, then run the back of the knife down the cob to press out the rest. A pint is roughly 2 cups, about 4 to 5 ears.
- Simmering timeAn hour is longer than fresh corn needs for flavour, but the point here is extraction before sieving. Keep it at a bare simmer with the lid on; a hard boil will reduce the two quarts too far.
- SievingRubbing through a fine sieve removes the hulls and gives the smooth texture the recipe is after. A blender first, then the sieve, does the same work in a fraction of the time. Some volume will be lost as discarded solids.
- The rouxOne tablespoon butter to two of flour is a stiff, slightly dry roux. Cook it a minute over low heat before adding the milk so the soup does not taste of raw flour, and add the milk off the heat, whisking, to avoid lumps.
- TemperingAdding a portion of the hot soup to the milk mixture before combining is the hinge of the method. Reversing it, or pouring cold cream straight into the kettle, risks curdling and lumps.
- Rich milk"Rich milk" in this period means whole milk with the cream not yet skimmed off. Whole milk works; half-and-half gives the intended body.
- YieldRoughly two quarts finished, serving six to eight as a first course. Do not let it boil once the milk is in.
Corn soups thickened with milk sit at the point where colonial American cooking met European white-sauce technique: the scraped-cob method is native to North American corn cookery, while the butter-flour-milk liaison is straight from the French repertoire that entered English and American household books through the nineteenth century. This version's real subject, though, is thrift. It begins with the water a chicken was boiled in, the byproduct of another meal, and turns it into a course in its own right. Fresh corn scraped from the cob also marks it as a summer dish in an era before reliable canned or frozen corn made the soup a year-round proposition.