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Cream of Corn, New Orleans
Remove leaves and silk from six fresh, sound ears of green corn. Detach grains from cobs and place in a saucepan with three ounces peeled, chopped almonds, one sliced onion, two sliced leeks, two branches celery, one branch chervil, one and a half quarts white broth, a quart milk, one heavy teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper, one saltspoon grated nutmeg and one saltspoon ground cinnamon; lightly mix and boil twenty-five minutes. Add three ounces rice and cook fifty minutes more. Press the cream through a sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into a saucepan, add half ounce butter and a gill cream; mix well while heating two minutes. Pour into a soup tureen and serve with bread croutons separately.
A long-cooked almond-and-rice puree rather than a quick corn chowder. The measurements are turn-of-the-century restaurant shorthand, and the straining is the step that makes or breaks it.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so the cayenne, nutmeg and cinnamon are each a scant quarter-teaspoon. A gill is 1/2 cup of cream. The "heavy teaspoon" of salt means a generous one, and with 1.5 quarts of broth in the pot it is worth salting to taste at the end instead.
- White brothThis means a pale, unbrowned stock, traditionally veal or chicken with no roasted bones. Unsalted chicken stock works; avoid dark or heavily reduced stock, which will muddy the color the recipe is built around.
- AlmondsSweet almonds, blanched and skinned. They are here as a thickener as much as a flavor, in the old almond-milk tradition, and 3 ounces is about 2/3 cup. Do not substitute bitter almonds or almond extract.
- The rice is the point of the long cookFifty minutes seems absurd for rice until you realize it is being cooked to collapse so it will pass through a sieve. Use a plain medium- or long-grain white rice, stir the bottom of the pot often, and keep the heat low: milk and starch together scorch quickly.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Modern practice is to puree in a blender first, then pass it through the chinois once; the two-stage sieving in the original is doing by hand what a blender does in thirty seconds.
- Chervil and leeksChervil is sold fresh only sporadically; a sprig of parsley plus a pinch of tarragon reads close. Slice the leeks and wash them thoroughly after slicing, since grit trapped in the layers will survive straining as a texture problem.
- CornSix ears give roughly 3 to 4 cups of kernels. Sweet corn of 1900 was starchier and less sweet than modern supersweet hybrids, so the finished soup may well taste sweeter than intended; the cayenne and cinnamon balance that sweetness and are worth keeping.
- Finishing and yieldAdd the butter and cream off the boil and heat gently; boiled cream in a starchy puree can break. Expect about eight servings as a first course. The croutons served separately are so they stay crisp.
The "New Orleans" in the title signals a Creole vocabulary rather than a recipe traceable to a particular Louisiana kitchen: corn, cayenne, and the warm spicing of nutmeg and cinnamon, a combination that appears in nineteenth-century Creole cookery for both savory and sweet dishes. The technique underneath is French hotel practice of the period, and the almonds point further back still: thickening a pale soup with ground almonds and rice instead of a flour roux is a medieval European habit that persisted in professional kitchens, producing the ivory color and velvet texture expected of a dish called a cream. The name here describes the consistency and the straining as much as the small quantity of dairy stirred in at the end.