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Cream of Corn Soup No. 2
1 cup corn 2 cups cold water 1 slice onion 2 cups milk 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon butter Salt, pepper Chop the corn, add water, and let it simmer twenty-five minutes; then rub through a sieve.
Scald the milk with the onion; then remove the onion. Melt the butter, add the flour, and gradually pour on the milk.
Mix the sauce with the corn; cook thoroughly, season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve hot.
A straightforward corn velouté that depends entirely on getting the corn pulp through the sieve and the milk sauce smooth. Nothing here is dated beyond the vagueness of the measurements.
- What "1 cup corn" meansThis could be canned corn, drained, or kernels cut from roughly two ears. Frozen kernels work equally well; if using fresh, scrape the cobs with the back of the knife after cutting so you get the milky pulp too.
- The sieve is the pointRubbing the simmered corn through a sieve removes the tough hulls, which is what separates this from a chowder. A blender or food processor before sieving makes the job much faster, but do not skip the sieve — the hulls will not break down.
- Scalding the milkHeat the milk with the onion slice to just below boiling, until it steams and shows a ring of bubbles at the edge, then hold it off the heat a few minutes to infuse before straining out the onion.
- Building the sauceOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to two cups of milk is a very thin roux, giving body rather than thickness. Cook the flour in the butter a minute before adding liquid, and add the milk gradually while whisking to avoid lumps.
- Don't boil after combiningA hard boil can make the milk look grainy. Bring the combined soup just to a simmer to cook out any floury taste, then season.
- YieldRoughly a pint and a half to a quart, depending on how much reduces away, serving three to four as a first course. It thickens as it stands; loosen with a little more milk when reheating.
Cream soups built on a thin white sauce were generally a fixture of American cookery-school teaching from the 1880s onward, and the pattern here — vegetable simmered, sieved, and married to a milk-and-flour base — is the same one applied to celery, asparagus, pea and tomato throughout books of this era. Milk and butter did the work of giving such a soup richness, and corn, cheap and available canned more or less year-round after what is often described as a post-Civil War expansion in canning, was among the more reliable vegetables to build on. The bare slice of onion scalded in the milk and then removed is a characteristic touch of the period.