Corn soup is best homemade, but canned can be OK, too

I TRY TO BE both a serious student and a serious sipper of corn soup.

For example, when I read announcements of church suppers or Lions Club feeds held in Western Maryland, my eyes light up at the words "chicken-corn soup."

I know this soup usually contains a stewing hen, 4 quarts of water, some chopped onions, some parsley, some celery, a couple of eggs and the kernels from 10 ears of corn. Moreover, I have been told that many soup makers, especially those trained in the Pennsylvania Dutch school of soup making, add about 2 cups of homemade noodles called rivels to their chicken-corn soup.

But my knowledge of this soup is mere book learning. It comes from reading recipes. It is inferior to ladle learning, the kind of knowledge you acquire either by making the soup yourself or by getting someone to ladle up a bowl or two for your enjoyment. Sooner or later, I have got to get me some ladle learning about chicken-corn soup.

The recipes I have seen for chicken-corn soup call for big portions. This is appropriate because the soup seems to be responsible for making some big reputations.

It is said up in Hampstead that when Edna Dubs cooks up a 40-quart batch of chicken-corn soup in her back yard the aroma of the soup carries all the way to Manchester, a distance of about five miles.

Dubs, who describes herself as a "good, country cook," has written a cookbook containing the recipe for her chicken-corn soup and other dishes. (The cookbook can be ordered by sending a check for $12.95 to: 4257 Maple Grove Road, Hampstead, Md. 21074. Allow four weeks for delivery.)

Good soup makers are appreciated in Western Maryland, I've learned. Recently, while reading the death notice of a Manchester woman, I saw mention that her friends remembered her as a fixture in the community and as a master of chicken-corn soup.

In my research I have found various recipes for corn soup in various regions of the country. A woman in Chicago makes corn soup by cooking kernels from an ear of corn plus chopped red and jalapeno peppers in bacon fat, then adding flour, chicken broth, cream and strips of cooked bacon.

A cook in Los Angeles makes her corn soup using curry powder, butter, nonfat milk, shredded Cheddar cheese, a package of frozen corn kernels and a can of cream-style corn.

Some people might disapprove of using packaged ingredients like canned corn to make soup. A soup made from scratch, with fresh corn, will probably have more delicate flavors than one with packaged corn. But soup makers don't always have time to husk a dozen ears of corn or stew a chicken. Sometimes the soup has to be delivered to the table in a hurry.

I found myself in that situation recently. My wife and our younger son were out of town, leaving the teen-ager and me to fend for ourselves. When I arrived home from work, the kid announced that he was starving, a description that usually means he has not eaten in approximately two hours.

I needed to whip up something fast, something that would put an end to the teen-ager's hunger and would not require me to do a lot of slicing and dicing.

I walked into the pantry, and my eyes settled on a can of Delmarva Sweet Corn Chowder. It was made by an outfit in Pocomoke City called Mid-Atlantic Foods Inc.

The head of the outfit, Wally Gordon, had told me he uses a corn-soup recipe his Baltimore relatives had used back in the late 1800s when they ran the Madison House restaurant at Eutaw and Madison streets and the Gordon Rose House, near the intersection of Gay and Fayette streets. Now the descendants of this corn soup were being sold in cans.

While I was impressed that this can of soup had tradition, I was primarily interested in its speed. It looked as if it could be whipped into something edible in about 5 minutes. The directions on the label called for emptying the contents of the can into a saucepan, then adding a can of milk. Then you stir the soup as it heats. You let it simmer, but you never let it boil.

I did not follow the directions. Instead of mixing in plain milk, I used half a can of cream and half a can of milk.

Then I added an ingredient to my corn soup: lumps of fresh crab meat. I heated. I stirred. I simmered. Finally I served two bowls of that sweet-smelling soup with slices of homemade bread.

It was not a complicated or nuanced dish. But it made a delicious corn-soup supper, one that I have had several requests to repeat.

Pub Date: 10/06/96