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Paleface Green Corn Soup
Scrape tender milky kernels from a dozen ears of field-fresh corn and, instead of throwing the cobs away, boil them 20 minutes in a quart of water. Discard cobs and add the scraped corn to their liquor. Boil 10 minutes before stirring in 2 quarts milk and 3/4 cup melted butter with 2 rounded tablespoons of flour stirred into it. Season with salt and pepper, boil 5 minutes more, and pour into soup tureen on top of well-beaten yolks of 3 eggs. 1/2 CUP OLIVE OIL 6 GARLIC CLOVES, MINCED 4 GARLIC CLOVES, CRUSHED
A cob-stock corn chowder thickened twice over, once with a butter-flour paste and again with egg yolks in the tureen. The corn matters more than anything else here: this only works with corn cut the day it is picked.
- "Field-fresh" is the whole recipeA dozen ears yields roughly 4 to 5 cups of kernels. The milky stage the text describes lasts about a day off the stalk; older supermarket corn gives starch without sweetness, and frozen kernels give no cob liquor at all.
- Scrape, do not cutCut the tips of the kernels off, then run the back of the knife down the cob to press out the milk. That pulp is what thickens and sweetens the soup.
- Cob stockSnap the bare cobs in half so they sit under the quart of water. Twenty minutes at a low boil is enough; longer starts to pull out a woody flavour.
- The butter is generous by modern tasteThree-quarters of a cup of butter to 2 quarts of milk is about 12 tablespoons. Half that still carries the 2 tablespoons of flour and produces a soup most cooks today will find rich enough.
- Keep the milk below a hard boilTwo quarts of milk boiled hard will scorch on the bottom. Bring it to a bare simmer, stir often, and count the five minutes from there.
- The egg yolksBeat the yolks in the bottom of a warmed tureen and pour the near-boiling soup over them from a height while whisking. Pour slowly and steadily or the yolks will scramble into threads instead of thickening. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg, since the yolks are only warmed by the soup.
- YieldAbout 3 1/2 quarts finished, serving 10 to 12 as a first course. It does not reheat well once the yolks are in; the liaison curdles on a second boil.
Green corn meant fresh corn at the milk stage, as distinct from the dried field corn kept for meal and stock feed, and green corn soups, puddings and cakes ran through nineteenth-century American cookery wherever there was a summer garden. Simmering the stripped cobs for a stock is an old thrift that turns out to be genuinely good technique: the cob and the milk clinging to it carry sugar and starch that would otherwise be discarded. Green corn cookery was Indigenous long before it appeared in printed receipt books, and a title of this sort reads very differently now than it did when it was written.