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Indian Green Corn Soup
Put plenty water in heap big kettle, salt to taste, add fat, pepper, and let come to boiling point. In the meantime cut fresh corn from cob, or use very tender young ears, cob and all, put in kettle, cook till done and eat the whole cob.
The instructions carry no quantities at all, so treat this as a method rather than a formula. The whole point is very young corn, cooked briefly in salted, fat-enriched water.
- "Green corn" means immature cornGreen corn is fresh sweet corn picked while the kernels are still milky, not dried field corn. Supermarket sweet corn works; anything with tough, starchy kernels will not.
- The eat-the-cob version needs baby cornThe eat-the-cob version needs a very immature ear -- Cobs are only edible while the ear is a few inches long and the core still soft, roughly the stage sold as baby corn. A full-size cob will not soften however long it boils, so with ordinary ears cut the kernels off and discard the cobs.
- Scrape the cobs before discardingRun the back of a knife down each stripped cob over the pot to release the milky starch. It thickens the broth slightly and adds sweetness.
- Cooking time"Cook till done" invites overcooking. Cut kernels need 5 to 8 minutes at a bare simmer; baby corn cut in rounds needs 10 to 12. Past that the sugars flatten and the kernels turn mealy.
- The fatNo type is named. Bacon fat, salt pork or butter all suit it; a tablespoon or two per quart of water is enough to carry flavour without slicking the surface.
- Proportions to work fromFor four servings, about 6 cups water to the kernels from 6 ears, salted to taste. 'Plenty water' points to a thin brothy soup rather than a chowder.
- Salt at the start, taste at the endSalting the water first seasons the kernels through, but an uncovered kettle left to boil will concentrate it. Check again before serving.
Corn soups and hominy stews are among the oldest continuously cooked dishes in North America, and many maize-growing nations had a version, from Haudenosaunee corn soup to the green-corn dishes of the Southwest. This entry, though, is written in stage-Indian dialect -- 'heap big kettle' -- a convention common in popular outdoor and camp-cookery writing, where dishes were given an Indigenous flavour in the telling; nothing here establishes who wrote it or where the method came from. Underneath the costume the technique is plain enough: the harvest window for green corn is short, so it was eaten while it lasted, and simmering the whole ear, cob and all, wastes nothing of a crop that would otherwise be dried and stored once past its sweet stage.