Corn Soup
Follow the recipe for Potato Soup, substituting one pint of canned corn for the potato. Sift before serving.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the book's Potato Soup in front of you; the base is the standard milk-thickened purée of the period — cooked vegetable, scalded milk, a butter-and-flour roux, onion, salt and pepper.
- Read the parent recipe firstNothing here works without the Potato Soup method: the corn simply takes the place of the cooked potato in the same quantity of milk and thickening. If your edition's Potato Soup gives no proportions, a workable base is 1 pint corn to 1 quart scalded milk, thickened with 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp flour.
- "Sift" means sieveThis is the hinge of the recipe. Corn hulls stay tough no matter how long you cook them, so the finished soup is pressed through a fine sieve or food mill to leave them behind. A blender alone will not do it — it chops the hulls smaller rather than removing them, and the soup stays gritty.
- A pint of canned cornAbout one standard 15 oz can, drained weight roughly 10-11 oz. Use the packing liquid as part of the soup liquid; it carries most of the sweetness. Cream-style corn will give a heavier soup and needs less flour.
- Canned corn then and nowCanned corn of this period was generally starchier and less sweet than modern supersweet varieties. Today's corn needs only to be heated through with the milk before sieving; long simmering flattens the flavour and can scorch the milk.
- Scald, don't boilMilk-based soups of this type break or catch on the pan bottom over direct high heat. Bring the milk just to the shiver, and once the roux is in, keep the soup below a simmer.
- SeasoningSalt lightly; white pepper is often used in soups of this kind so the colour stays pale. A blade of mace or a slice of onion steeped in the milk and then removed would not be out of keeping.
Cream soups built on a base of scalded milk, a butter-and-flour thickening and one puréed vegetable were a backbone of American luncheon cookery, and cookbooks of the period routinely printed one full method and then a string of one-line substitutions — corn, celery, pea, asparagus — rather than repeating themselves. That editorial shortcut is what you are reading here. Corn was among the first vegetables to be canned successfully on a commercial scale in the United States, and by the time this book appeared a can of corn was an ordinary pantry item, available in winter when fresh corn was months away. The instruction to sift may point to the age of the recipe: the hull of a corn kernel is indigestible cellulose, and the refined table of the period expected a smooth, pale, spoonable soup with nothing in it to catch the teeth.