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Corn Soup
1 can corn. 1 pint boiling water 1 pint milk 1 slice onion 2 tablespoons flour 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Chop the corn, add water, and simmer twenty minutes; rub through a sieve. Scald milk with onion, remove onion, and add milk to corn. Bind with butter and flour cooked together. Add salt and pepper. Serve with popped corn.
A plain white-sauce soup from Fannie Farmer's chapter on soups made without meat stock. It comes together in half an hour and depends almost entirely on the quality of the corn.
- The corn quantityThe ingredient list as printed does not state how much corn to use. Versions of this soup generally call for about a pint of corn — a drained can, or the kernels cut from several ears.
- Chop the cornChopping before simmering breaks the kernel hulls so the milky interior releases into the water. With fresh corn, scrape the cobs with the back of a knife after cutting and add the scrapings; the milky pulp left at the base of the kernel carries much of the starch and sweetness.
- Rubbing through a sieveThis is the step that makes or breaks the texture. A food mill or a blender followed by a fine sieve does the same work faster, but press hard on the solids and discard only the papery hulls.
- Scalding the milkScalded means heated to just below boiling, around 180F, until a ring of bubbles forms at the edge. The slice of onion is there to perfume the milk only; take it out before it colors the soup.
- Binding with butter and flourTwo tablespoons each makes a pale roux. Cook it a minute or two over low heat to lose the raw flour taste, then whisk in a ladle of the hot soup before returning it all to the pot, or it will lump.
- Do not boil after bindingOnce the milk and roux are in, hold the soup below a simmer. Milk soups scorch on the bottom of the pan quickly and the burnt taste cannot be corrected.
- Popped corn as garnishPeriod garnish, and a good one: plain popcorn, unsalted and unbuttered, scattered on each bowl at the table so it stays crisp.
- YieldOne pint water plus one pint milk gives roughly a quart of finished soup — four small first-course servings.
Corn soups of this kind fill the "soups without stock" chapter of American cookbooks from the 1880s onward, when canned sweet corn had become cheap and reliable and a cook could make a creditable soup in any season without a stockpot going. The method is the standard cream-soup formula of the Boston Cooking School: a vegetable pulp, scalded milk flavored with onion, and a butter-and-flour binding, a template Fannie Farmer applies in turn to peas, celery, asparagus and potato.