There’s nothing worse than biting into a perfect ear of corn—crispy and sweet, ideally Silver Queen—and realizing there isn’t enough for you to totally gorge yourself on it. I eat mine in tidy rows, and I often don’t/can’t put the ear down until I’m completely done with it. My husband has a slot machine style of eating corn: a bite, then a spin and a random distance along the x-axis to his next bite. When the corn is excellent, this eating will be accompanied by repetitive, unoriginal conversation regarding nothing else. I often factor each person will eat 3 ears, but not everyone is as crazy for it as I am. So there are leftovers.
Luckily there are delicious things to do with leftover corn. Cut off the kernels and mix with tomatoes and basil for a side dish excellent with steak or a piece of fish. Breakfast corn fritters—bound with egg and flour, cooked in butter, and topped with maple syrup—are a family obsession. But one of my favorite ways is corn soup. This is not a creamy chowder (though it does use a bit of milk) or even a pureed, velvety corn soup. It’s light and brothy. The broth looks a bit like dishwater, honestly, but it really tastes like summer.
In the hot weather—or better yet, September, when it wanes—a thin, corn-sweet broth studded with potatoes, bacon, and corn, heavily peppered, is a nice change from the raw tomato–focused eating of the season. It’s a great rented-summer-house lunch, best served on a screened-in porch on a rainy day, after some intense jigsaw puzzling, as it requires no equipment but a pot, and nothing but ingredients you will likely have already. The potatoes can be raw, or leftover; the milk can be any type, even skim. And the best part? Making corn stock with the cobs uses an otherwise inedible part of the product, and actually makes the soup better. If you’re me, this gives great satisfaction. This particular version of the soup also includes shrimp (so I make stock from their shells as well), as it was for dinner and I felt like splurging a bit—but the basic formula sans shrimp is as delicious.
Corn (Cob) Soup
Brown 1/4 pound chopped bacon and an onion (or a large, well-cleaned leek) in a large pot with a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Remove all the kernels from 4 ears of corn (fresh or leftover) and scrape the ears with the back of your knife to extract the “milk.” When the bacon and onion are soft and brown, add the stripped cobs and enough water to cover—a couple of quarts perhaps—and simmer 15 minutes or so. Meanwhile peel and devein a pound of shrimp and add the shells to a small pot with water to cover by an inch or so; simmer the shells about 10 minutes. Discard the cobs. Add 4 chopped new potatoes to the corn broth and cook until tender. When the shrimp broth is ready, strain it into the rest of the soup, discarding the shells. Add the shrimp, corn kernels, chopped basil (optional), salt and pepper, and a big glug of milk. When the shrimp are just pink and all is heated through, adjust seasoning and serve.
