Chinese Corn and Chicken Soup
When I was a child, my mom often made what we called “cream corn soup” as a quick, belly warming supplement to go along with our usual meals of rice and stir-fries. Like many immigrant Chinese cooks who prepared similar versions of this dish, she would crack open a can of cream-style corn and heat it in a pot with some water before stirring in a beaten egg that would set into wispy threads suspended in the silky, viscous liquid. At the table, we’d pass around the white pepper to shake on as much as we liked. The dish came together in minutes, nearly as easy to prepare as the Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle soup that shared space in our pantry with the fleet of canned corn.
“The Chinese cook is sort of masterful at putting together so many components that add flavor and texture, and yet you can’t quite put your finger on what it is.”
–Chinese culinary authority Grace Young
Ours was a stripped-down version of the now-classic Chinese American corn and chicken soup that is commonly referred to as ji rong yu
