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Kornlet Soup
1 tablespoon chopped onion 4 tablespoons flour 1 quart milk, scalded 1½ teaspoons salt Few grains pepper 1 pint cold water 4 tablespoons butter Cook kornlet in cold water twenty minutes; rub through a sieve, and add milk. Fry butter and onion three minutes; remove onion, add flour, salt, and pepper, and stir into boiling soup. 3 potatoes 1 quart milk 2 slices onion 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour
The text as printed is scrambled: the ingredient list omits the quantity of kornlet itself, and the final five lines (potatoes, a second quart of milk, onion, butter, flour) belong to the potato soup that followed it in the book. Read the method with the first ingredient list only.
- What kornlet wasKornlet was a branded canned product of the early 1900s — the pulp scraped from green (immature) sweet corn ears, packed without kernels or hulls. It has not been sold for generations. Cream-style corn, or the pulp scraped from four or five ears of fresh sweet corn, is the nearest stand-in; the original can size is unknown, so scale to taste.
- The missing quantityThe original almost certainly called for one can. Since the can size is not given and the product no longer exists, treat this as genuinely ambiguous and scale to taste against the quart of milk.
- Twenty minutes is for canned pulpSimmering canned or fresh corn pulp twenty minutes in the water is there to soften it enough to sieve. Fresh scraped corn needs perhaps ten, and if you are using cream-style corn you can shorten it further — the point is a purée, not extraction.
- Sieving matters more than it soundsThe hinge of the dish is pushing the cooked corn through a sieve to leave the hulls behind; that is what gave kornlet soup its smooth body without cream. A blender then a fine strainer does the same work.
- The onion is flavouring onlyButter and onion are fried three minutes and the onion is removed — you are perfuming the butter, not building a soffritto. Keep the heat low so the butter does not brown.
- Thickening techniqueFour tablespoons each of butter and flour makes a fairly stiff roux for the quart of milk and pint of water here; stir it into the simmering soup in pieces and let it boil a minute or two so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Scalded milkScalding may have served to check the milk's freshness and to shorten cooking with raw milk. With pasteurised milk it is optional, though heating it before it meets the hot corn purée reduces the chance of curdling.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half of finished soup, or four to six first-course servings.
Fannie Farmer's "Soups Without Stock" chapter is a catalogue of what an American household could put on the table without a stockpot going all day, and it leans heavily on milk, butter, flour and whatever the pantry shelf held. Kornlet belongs squarely to that pantry: it was a trademarked canned green-corn pulp, sold as the pressed-out flesh of young sweet corn with the tough hulls removed. Its appearance here, by brand name and with no explanation, shows how quickly branded canned goods were absorbed into standard recipe writing, leaving a recipe that reads as a puzzle a century later. The soup itself is a corn version of the milk-thickened purées that fill the chapter, close kin to the potato soup whose ingredients have wandered into the bottom of this page.