Home › Left-Over Vegetables › Corn Soup
Corn Soup
3 ears cooked corn 3 cups cold water Slice of onion 1 egg 2 cups white sauce No. I (see page 67) ½ teaspoonful salt A little celery or celery salt Score the corn by cutting with a sharp knife down each row of kernels. Scrape out the corn with a spoon, leaving hulls on the cob. Set the scraped corn aside; there should be half a cupful.
Cook cobs in water with onion, celery, and salt for half an hour, or until the water is reduced to one cupful. Add this to the white sauce, season more highly if necessary, boil up well, and when ready to serve put in the half cupful of corn.
Heat a little, but do not boil. Beat egg and put into the tureen, pour the soup gradually over it, stirring, to mix evenly.
A thrift soup built on two things most kitchens throw away: the scraped cobs from last night's corn and a cup of leftover white sauce. The cob broth is the whole point, so do not shortcut it.
- White sauce No. IThe recipe sends you to page 67; in books of this type the lowest-numbered white sauce is usually the thinnest, on the order of 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour per cup of milk with salt. Check the book's own page rather than assuming. Make 2 cups fresh if you have none left over; anything much thicker will make the finished soup pasty.
- Scoring and scrapingRun the knife tip down the centre of each row of kernels, then scrape with a spoon so the pulp and milk come out and the tough hulls stay on the cob. This is the difference between a smooth soup and one full of skins.
- The cob brothThree cobs in 3 cups water reduced to 1 cup over about half an hour is a hard reduction; use a small saucepan and keep it at a steady simmer rather than a rolling boil, and check the level toward the end. Cobs carry most of the sweet corn flavour, which is why the recipe bothers with them.
- CeleryA stalk with leaves, or an outer rib, works better than celery salt here — if you use the salt, cut back the ½ teaspoon of salt accordingly or the reduced broth will be sharp.
- Do not boil after the corn goes inThe scraped kernels are already cooked; they only need warming through. Boiling them again makes them starchy and dulls the flavour the cob broth was built to carry.
- The egg liaisonThe beaten egg in the tureen thickens and enriches the soup as the hot liquid is poured over it. Pour slowly and stir constantly or you will get shreds of cooked egg. Because the egg is only warmed, not cooked, use a pasteurized egg if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- YieldAbout 3½ cups finished soup — two generous or four small servings as a first course.
Corn-cob broth is an old North American economy generally said to predate canned stock, and it survived well into the twentieth century in household manuals like this one, where nothing edible was allowed to leave the kitchen unused. The technique of scoring and scraping the ears rather than cutting the kernels whole is the same one used for the dish often called grated or scraped corn, and it appears in American cookery writing through the nineteenth century. The finishing egg beaten in the tureen is the older European liaison, the same move that thickens Greek avgolemono or a French potage lié; egg and white sauce were featured devices in turn-of-the-century soup recipes as a way to make a small quantity of milk and flour taste like something richer. Left-over cookbooks of this period appear to have been aimed at cooks running a household on a fixed allowance, and their appeal seems to have been practical rather than nostalgic: three eaten ears of corn, some of yesterday's sauce and one egg made a course.