Corn, Corn, it Makes You Glad You're Born

Let’s talk about soup.

I know, I know – it’s the end of June, and regardless of where you are, you think it’s too hot for soup.

Well, you’re wrong. It might be too hot for certain kinds of soups – particularly hearty beef stews, perhaps, or ones like butternut squash that are dependent on autumn vegetables – but soup itself is never out of season.

When I was younger, I had a very old, very obscure, and kind of racist “mystery novel for girls” called The Chinese Pagoda Mystery (it is so old and obscure, apparently, that it doesn’t exist on The Google at present*, which makes me glad that my copy still resides somewhere in a box in my parents’ house). One of the moments from it I’ll always remember is that while the intrepid girl sleuths were hanging out in the pagoda one day, one of them complains about the heat and the other makes them hot tea. She points out that in novels set in Empire era India, the heat is described so well you can feel it, and then relieved when a servant arrives in the narrative with tea.

As ridiculous as that anecdote seems on any number of levels, the point is that hot drinks on hot days don’t make you hotter – they can be quite refreshing. And I put soup in the same category – a cup of delicious, piping hot soup in the middle of a hot day can be the perfect pick-me-up, and it won’t make you sullen and sleepy the way a heavier meal – hot or cold – might.

So I eat a lot of soups, year ‘round, and since I try to make a fair percentage of the food I eat, I make a lot of soups. As a result, I’ve been burning through the soup recipes in Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook, and for the most part, I’ve been quite satisfied.

We’ve discussed the white bean soup, which, if you’ll recall, was amazing. Now let’s talk about corn chowder. Corn chowder, in my mind, is the ultimate summer soup. You’ve got the crisp, sweet, summery taste of corn in the form of a delicious, creamy soup.

And in this one, you’ve also got bacon. The original recipe calls for two slices of turkey bacon, diced, and some butter. But as you know, turkey gives me syphilis, so I was pleased to see a note at the bottom of the recipe saying that you could also “make this with…pork bacon instead…in which case you won’t need the butter.”

So I diced two slices of bacon and tossed it into my soup pot, and let it brown up for four minutes while I poked at it periodically. And then I threw in 2 peeled and diced shallots, a half of a large yellow onion, some thyme, and a bay leaf, and cooked that for about five minutes, stirring it on occasion.

The next step, clearly, is corn. The recipe calls for the kernels from 6 ears of corn, but because I tend to be horrifically lazy on weekends, there were only four decent ears of corn at the market by the time I went. So I cut the kernels off of those ears, and then also used a bit more than a cup of (thawed) frozen kernels to make up the difference.

After that business and some salt and pepper had been allowed to hang out together for a minute, I added 2 cups of vegetable stock, a cup of milk, and the denuded corn cobs and allowed that all to come to a boil. Then I smacked a lid on it and let it simmer for 30 minutes.

Mmmmm... reminds me of Sanctuary.

After the 30 minutes was up, I fished the cobs and bay leaves out of the soup pot and poured a ladleful of soup into the little cup thing that came with my immersion blender, which I find does a better job of completely obliterating soup bits than my standing blender does. I zapped it thoroughly, and then returned it to the soup pot, adding a bit more salt and pepper before dishing myself up a portion.

I wish the color in that showed up better, because it’s a really delightful shade of pale sunshiney yellow, studded through with brighter gold spots from the corn and delicious little chunks of bacon. And it is so, so good. It’s got a texture as smooth, soft, and rich as a new beach blanket, and the combination of the sweet corn and smoky bacon flavors is like having a whole picnic in a single cup.

In short? It’s summer in soup form. Enjoy it before the weather gets too cold.

*I have seen copies on e-bay in the past, so I’m confident that I’ve got the name right.