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Cream of Corn Soup No. 1
1 can of corn 1 quart milk 2 teaspoons salt 3 tablespoons flour 3 tablespoons butter Turn the corn into a saucepan, adding a little water, and cook gently over the fire for a few minutes. Prepare a white sauce of the milk, flour, butter and salt. Turn the corn into the white sauce, and cook together for a few minutes.
A plain white-sauce soup of the sort that filled the soup course in meatless households. Two details need attention: the can size, which has shrunk, and the salt, which was written for unsalted corn.
- The canCanned corn was commonly sold in a No. 2 can, about 20 fl oz, or roughly two and a half cups of kernels and liquor. Today's can is about 15 oz, so use two and drain one, or a 15 oz can plus a cup of frozen kernels.
- SaltTwo teaspoons is a great deal of salt for a quart of milk, and most canned corn sold today is packed with salt; start with half a teaspoon in the sauce, taste at the end, and add from there.
- Whole kernel or cream styleEither works. Cream-style gives a thicker, slightly starchy body; whole kernel gives a thinner soup with texture.
- The white sauceMelt the butter, stir in the flour, and let the roux cook a minute or two without colouring before adding the milk in a slow stream, whisking. Three tablespoons of each to a quart of milk is a thin sauce, correct for soup.
- Heat after the corn goes inOnce the corn joins the sauce, keep it below a boil. A quart of milk thickened with flour scorches on the bottom quickly, and the burnt note carries through the whole pot.
- SievingPeriod cream-soup recipes often direct that the cooked corn be pressed through a sieve before it goes into the sauce, though this one does not. A short pass with an immersion blender does the same job; leave a few kernels whole if you like.
- YieldRoughly six cups, serving four to six as a first course. It thickens on standing; loosen with milk when reheating.
Cream soups built on a flour-and-butter white sauce were the backbone of the American meatless soup course from the late nineteenth century onward, a period in which domestic-science teaching is often credited with settling the proportions of butter, flour and milk into a formula a cook could apply to any vegetable. Canned corn made this particular one a year-round dish: by the time books like this were written it was a cheap, ordinary pantry item rather than a novelty. The numbering of the title, "No. 1," tells you something about the genre as well: compilers commonly printed more than one version of the same soup.