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Corn Soup
1 can corn. 1 quart milk. 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour Salt and pepper Yolks of 2 eggs 1 tablespoon chopped onion Put the corn in the kettle, with the milk. Remove to the cooker for two hours or more. Fry the chopped onion in butter; add the flour and cook until smooth. Strain and add. Season with salt, pepper and paprika. Put in double boiler to keep hot, and just before serving add the yolks of eggs, well beaten. O
The page is a loose leaf, and it shows: the quantities for the two main ingredients never made it onto the sheet, and paprika appears in the method but not the list. What follows is a cream-of-corn soup thickened with a butter-flour roux and finished with egg yolks.
- The missing quantitiesNeither the corn nor the milk is given an amount, so any figure here would be invented. Three tablespoons each of butter and flour will thicken about a quart of liquid, which suggests roughly 4 cups milk to 2 cups corn kernels — treat that as a reading of the roux, not as the author's intention.
- What "the cooker" isA fireless cooker was an insulated box, packed with hay, felt or asbestos, into which a sealed kettle of boiling food was transferred to finish by retained heat. It works on much the same principle as the later slow cooker, though the two are not directly related.
- Bring it to a full boil firstFireless cookery depends entirely on the food entering the box boiling hot; the temperature then falls steadily for hours. Milk and corn held in that declining range are hospitable to bacteria, so if you are reproducing this, simmer the corn and milk on the stove for 30-40 minutes or use a slow cooker on low, where the heat is maintained rather than merely conserved.
- "Strain and add"The instruction is compressed and ambiguous. It most likely means to strain the onion out of the cooked roux and add it to the corn and milk; it may instead mean to strain the corn and milk before adding the roux. If you do sieve the corn, pressing the pulp through rather than discarding it gives a fuller soup.
- The egg yolks are the hingeBeat the yolks, slacken them with a ladle of hot soup, then return the mixture to the pot off direct heat. Added straight to a boiling pot they scramble and the soup turns grainy — hence the double boiler, which holds the soup below a boil.
- PaprikaListed only in the method. Paprika of the period was mild and often used as much for colour as for flavour; a scant half teaspoon is enough.
- YieldOn the quantities guessed at above, about a quart, or four modest first-course servings. It does not reheat well once the yolks are in — thickened egg soups break on a second boil.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and 1920, promoted in cookbooks and government pamphlets as a way to save fuel and to leave a meal unattended: food was boiled hard on the range, then shut into a hay-lined chest to coast for hours. Wartime fuel economy in 1917-18 gave the method a second push, and books of the period commonly carried a dedicated fireless section. The soup itself belongs to an older and broader American family of green-corn soups, made from the milky summer corn that cooks had in glut for a few weeks each year; the egg-yolk finish is a standard nineteenth-century liaison, generally traced to French practice and seemingly familiar enough in American cookbooks of the date to pass with little explanation.