Corn Soup
1½ teaspoons salt celery salt and cayenne 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup beaten cream 2 tablespoons chopped onion 2 cups scalded milk 1 cup popped corn Cook corn in cold water twenty minutes. Press through a sieve; add scalded milk. Cook onion in butter, add flour and seasonings, corn mixture, cook five minutes, strain, add beaten cream, and serve. Garnish with popped corn. 6 medium-sized onions 3 cups cold water 2 cups scalded milk salt and cayenne
The text as printed has been scrambled — the ingredient list runs together and a second list (six onions, three cups cold water, milk, salt and cayenne) has been dragged in from the neighboring onion soup. What is actually being made here is a smooth cream soup thickened with popcorn.
- Sort out the ingredients firstThe soup itself needs: 1 cup popped corn, water for the first cooking (no amount given for this soup; see below), 2 cups scalded milk, 2 tablespoons chopped onion, 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 1½ teaspoons salt, celery salt and cayenne, and 1 cup beaten cream. The trailing "6 medium-sized onions / 3 cups cold water / 2 cups scalded milk / salt and cayenne" appears to belong to a second recipe on the same page.
- The water quantity is missing from the method"Cook corn in cold water twenty minutes" gives no amount in the soup's own list; 3 cups is the figure that fits the finished volume and the ratio of the roux. Treat it as an estimate rather than a fixed measure.
- Popcorn as the flavor baseThe recipe assumes plain popped corn, without butter, salt or sugar. The corn is simmered for its flavor, then pressed through a sieve and the mixture strained again later, so what remains in the soup is the flavor and a little pulp rather than the corn as a vegetable.
- "Beaten cream" means whippedHeavy cream whipped to soft peaks, folded in off the heat at the last moment for lightness. If the soup is boiling when it goes in, the foam collapses and you have simply added cream.
- Scalded milkHeated to just below the boil, around 180F, until it steams and shows fine bubbles at the edge. With the milk of the period this helped keep it from souring or curdling in the soup; with pasteurized milk it mainly serves to bring the liquid up to temperature so the soup does not have to be reheated hard.
- Strain twiceOnce after the popcorn has simmered, once after the five-minute cook with the roux. The second pass is what makes the difference between a smooth cream soup and one with grainy hull fragments.
- Cayenne and celery salt are undosedBoth are listed without quantity, as was common. Start with a scant ⅛ teaspoon celery salt and a pinch of cayenne, and reduce the 1½ teaspoons salt accordingly since the celery salt is mostly salt.
- YieldAbout 5 cups, serving four as a first course. Reserve a handful of popcorn from the original cup for the garnish, and add it at the table so it stays crisp.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer; like Baker's and Royal Baking Powder, the firm published a general cookbook carrying its name alongside its advertising. That accounts for the book's shape: a full domestic manual with a heavy chocolate and confectionery section. Corn soups run through American cookery of the period in two forms, one built on green corn or canned kernels, the other — as here — using popped corn for its roasted flavor, which appears in some late nineteenth-century collections. Popcorn itself was an established American snack by the 1890s, sold from steam-powered street wagons, so a cup of it was an ordinary thing to have in a Boston kitchen.