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Cream of Green Corn, Tomatee
Remove leaves and silks from six ears sound green corn and detach grains from cobs. Place in a saucepan with a sliced onion, two sliced leeks, two branches celery, one branch each chervil and parsley. Moisten with three pints white broth and one quart milk. Season with heavy teaspoon salt, let come to a boil, then add three ounces raw rice and let gently boil one hour and fifteen minutes, being careful to mix at bottom once in a while. Press cream through sieve into a basin, then through Chinese strainer into another saucepan. Pour in one pint tomato sauce, add a half ounce butter, mix well and boil for five minutes. Place bread croutons in a soup tureen, pour soup over and serve.
A classic purée-style soup in French restaurant idiom, built on fresh corn and thickened with rice rather than flour. Most of the work is in the straining.
- "Cream" means the soupIn this book cream of denotes a sieved purée soup, not an ingredient. The only dairy is the quart of milk, and no cream is added at any point.
- Green cornFresh sweet corn in the milk stage, not a distinct variety. Six ears yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of kernels. Frozen kernels work, though the cobs are worth simmering in the broth if you have them.
- White brothA pale unroasted stock, veal or chicken. Three pints is 6 cups; with the quart of milk you are starting with about 10 cups of liquid, which reduces considerably over the long simmer.
- The rice is the thickenerThree ounces is a scant 1/2 cup of raw long-grain or Carolina-style rice. It must break down completely, and the recipe's "gently boil" plus its own instruction to mix at the bottom matters: rice scorches and the burnt taste carries through the whole tureen.
- The long simmerAn hour and fifteen minutes is longer than modern corn soups run, and it is aimed at the rice and the tough kernel hulls rather than the corn flavour. If you want a brighter result, hold back a cup of kernels and add them in the last five minutes.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. The two-stage straining, coarse sieve then chinois, is what removes the corn hulls; skipping the second pass leaves the soup gritty. A blender before the sieve makes it much easier.
- Tomato sauceNot a seasoned pasta sauce but the classical tomato sauce of the period: tomatoes cooked down with aromatics and a little roux. A pint of plain passata or thin tomato purée is closer than anything jarred.
- HerbsChervil has largely vanished from shops; a little tarragon plus extra parsley approximates its anise note. "Branches" of celery here means ribs.
- YieldRoughly eight servings, depending on how far the soup has reduced. The book says only "bread croutons"; put them in the tureen at the last moment or they go to mush.
The International Cook Book is generally credited to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its structure shows it: American market produce handled in the vocabulary of the French professional kitchen. Green corn, meaning corn picked young and eaten fresh rather than dried for meal, was a distinctly American ingredient that European-trained chefs in the United States absorbed quickly, and pairing it with tomato was a late nineteenth-century habit that turns up in chowders and purées of the period. Rice as the thickening agent, rather than flour or a bread panada, marks this as a restaurant recipe: it gives a cleaner, less pasty body once the whole thing has gone through the chinois.