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Green Corn Soup
One large fowl, or four pounds veal (the knuckle or neck will do), put over fire in one gallon cold water without salt, cover tightly and simmer slowly till meat slips from the bones, not allowing it to boil to rags, as the meat will make a nice dish for breakfast or lunch, or even for dinner. Set aside with the meat a cup of the liquor; strain the soup to remove all bones and rags of meat; grate one dozen ears of green corn, scraping cobs to remove the heart of the kernel, add corn to soup, with salt, pepper, and a little parsley, and simmer slowly half an hour. Just before serving add a tablespoon flour beaten very thoroughly with a table-spoon butter. Serve hot. To serve chicken or veal, put broth (which was reserved) in a clean sauce-pan, beat one egg, a table-spoon butter and a teaspoon flour together very thoroughly, and add to the broth with salt, pepper, and a little chopped parsley. Arrange meat on dish, pour over dressing, boiling hot, and serve at once.
A two-in-one recipe: a corn soup from the stock, and a dressed platter of the boiled meat for a second meal. The corn is the whole point, so treat it accordingly.
- Green corn"Green" means fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, not a green variety. A dozen ears grated and scraped yields roughly 4 to 5 cups of pulp and milk; frozen kernels will work but need a brief blitz in a processor, since the recipe depends on the starchy corn milk for body.
- Scrape the cobsThe instruction to scrape after grating is the hinge. Grating leaves a good deal of starchy milk behind in the kernel bases, and a spoon or dull knife run down the cut cob releases it. Skip it and the soup will be thinner.
- Simmer, do not boil"Not allowing it to boil to rags" is literal. Keep the pot at a bare tremble, roughly 2 to 3 hours for a fowl and 3 to 4 for a veal knuckle, so the meat stays intact enough to serve whole later.
- Corn timingHalf an hour suits corn that is starchier than what is sold now. Modern supersweet varieties are tender in 10 to 15 minutes; longer cooking dulls the flavor and turns the pulp pasty.
- Salt at the endThe recipe is explicit that the pot starts "without salt"; older cookery held that salting early kept the meat from yielding its juices. Season only once the corn is in, as directed.
- The finishing butter and flourA tablespoon each, kneaded cold into a paste, is beurre manié. Whisk it in off the boil in small pieces and let the soup return to a simmer for a minute or two so the flour cooks out.
- The dressing for the meatThat cup of reserved broth thickened with egg, butter and flour is a small sauce that will curdle if it boils hard after the egg goes in. Temper the beaten egg with a little hot broth first, then bring the sauce just to the point of steaming.
- YieldA gallon of water, simmered covered and then bulked out with the corn, gives a large tureen of soup plus the boiled meat as a separate dish.
Green corn soups belong to the late-summer weeks when sweet corn was briefly abundant and could not be kept, and they sit alongside the green corn puddings, fritters and "corn oysters" that fill American cookbooks of the nineteenth century. The grating-and-scraping method is older than the soup itself, though how it reached colonial and Southern kitchens is not clearly documented. What is most characteristic of The Dixie Cook Book here is the frugality: one long simmer produces both a tureen of soup and a dressed dish of boiled fowl or veal, with the cook told in advance which meals it might serve. A veal knuckle or neck, cheap cuts rich in gelatin, was chosen for the same reason -- body in the broth at minimal cost.