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Chicken and Corn Soup
Take two quarts of the liquor in which a chicken or fowl has been boiled, add one pint of corn scraped from the cob, or one can. In a small saucepan melt one tablespoonful of butter, add two tablespoonfuls of flour, and when mixed, one cupful of rich milk or cream (cream is better). Add gradually a portion of the soup and when smooth turn into the large kettle. Season to taste, sprinkle in one tablespoonful of very finely chopped parsley, and serve.
A thickened chicken-and-corn soup built on leftover poaching liquor, from an era when a boiled fowl was a weekly event and its broth was never thrown out. The whole thing takes about half an hour if the stock is already made.
- The stock is the recipeTwo quarts of chicken poaching liquor is the entire foundation, and unsalted homemade stock behaves very differently from commercial broth. If you use canned or boxed stock, taste before seasoning at the end: many are salty enough already, and reducing the corn liquid concentrates it further.
- "Scraped from the cob"Scraping, not cutting, is deliberate. Cut the kernel tops off with a knife, then run the back of the blade down the cob to press out the milky pulp, which thickens and sweetens the soup. Cutting whole kernels away leaves that behind. One pint is about 4 to 5 ears.
- Canned cornCanned corn of this period was generally packed in its own starchy liquor rather than brine, and was nearer to creamed corn than today's product. Modern canned kernels in brine should be drained; frozen corn is the closer substitute.
- Rich milkMilk of the period was unhomogenized, and 'rich milk' generally meant milk with cream added rather than plain whole milk. The recipe already tells you cream is better, and heavy cream or half-and-half gives the intended body.
- Tempering the rouxThe instruction to add "a portion of the soup" to the white sauce before it goes into the kettle is the hinge. Adding hot broth gradually to the butter-flour-cream mixture prevents both lumps and curdling; dumping the cold sauce into two quarts of hot stock does neither.
- Cook the corn, then hold backSimmer the corn in the broth 10 to 15 minutes before thickening. Once the cream is in, keep the pot below a boil — sustained boiling after the dairy goes in will break it and can scorch the flour on the bottom.
- Seasoning'Season to taste' is unspecified; salt and pepper are the obvious reading, and white pepper keeps the soup pale. Nutmeg turns up in some cream soups of the period and would suit this one.
- YieldRoughly three quarts, serving six to eight as a first course.
Cream-thickened vegetable soups built on a butter-and-flour liaison were standard American household cooking by the end of the nineteenth century, and this one is a thrift dish first and a recipe second: it exists because boiling a fowl leaves two quarts of good liquor behind, and no careful cook discarded it. Sweet corn was the summer vegetable of the American table, and canned corn was among the earliest commercially successful canned goods in the United States, which is why the book can offer "or one can" without apology. The technique of scraping the cob to capture the milky interior of the kernel is older than the canning industry and appears throughout American cookbooks of the period under names like corn oysters and green corn pudding.