No. 256

Cream of Green Corn a la Mendocino

Creme de Mais Vertes a la Mendocino

Cook the corn on the cob in salted water, adding a piece of butter; when done, remove the grains, mash them in a mortar, and dilute the puree with a quart and a half of broth; strain through a sieve or tammy, and set it into a saucepan; heat it up without allowing it to boil, and season with salt, sugar and nutmeg. Just when ready to serve, thicken the soup with egg-yolks, cream and fine crawfish butter (No. 573), with lemon juice added. Serve with a garnishing composed of shrimp tails, cut in small pieces.

← No. 255 Cream of Green Corn a la Hermann Soups & Broths No. 257 Cream of Jerusalem Artichokes →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional brigade and a stocked larder, so the quantities of corn, egg and cream are left to the cook's judgment. The soup itself is straightforward: a corn purée let down with broth and finished with a yolk liaison.

The hinge: never let it boil after the liaisonEgg yolks whisked into hot soup set into curds above roughly 180F. Temper the yolk-and-cream mixture with a ladle of hot soup, return it off the heat, and hold the pot below a simmer until service.
How much cornNo amount is given. For the quart and a half of broth specified, eight to ten ears of sweet corn gives a purée of the right body; frozen kernels work but lack the milky starch of fresh cobs.
"Green corn"Nineteenth-century American usage for fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, as opposed to dried field corn. It is not a colour.
Mortar and tammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force purée through. A blender and then a chinois or fine sieve does the same work; the straining is not optional, as corn hulls are unpleasant in a cream soup.
Crawfish butter, No. 573A compound butter of the classical type: crawfish shells and trimmings pounded with butter, melted, and strained through cloth into iced water. The book gives the method under its own number. Shrimp or lobster shells can be treated the same way. Whisk it in cold, off the heat, or the emulsion breaks and it goes oily.
The brothMost likely a light veal or chicken broth of the kind used throughout the book. A mild, unsalted chicken stock is the closest modern equivalent; a heavily reduced stock will bury the corn.
Sugar and nutmegModern sweet corn is far sweeter than 1890s varieties, so taste before adding any sugar. The nutmeg should be barely detectable behind the shellfish butter.
Garnish and yieldCook small shrimp separately, no more than two minutes, and cut the tails into short lengths so they sit in the spoon. A quart and a half of broth plus the corn and liaison serves six to eight as a first course.

A Little History

This is No. 256 in The Epicurean (1894), Charles Ranhofer's vast record of the food he cooked during more than thirty years as chef of Delmonico's in New York. The book runs to well over a thousand numbered preparations, cross-referenced like an encyclopedia, which is why the crawfish butter arrives here only as a number. Its long run of green corn soups — this one, the Hermann immediately before it, and others — shows a French-trained kitchen doing what French kitchens in America had to do: taking a wholly American ingredient, one with no place in the classical repertoire, and dressing it in a velouté-style liaison of yolks, cream and shellfish butter. The Mendocino name follows the book's habit of attaching place names and patrons' names to variations of a base preparation; whether it points to the California county or to a Delmonico's regular is not documented.