CORN CHOWDER My mother’s corn chowder recipe involved a can of creamed corn, an equal amount of half-and-half, and a teaspoon of chicken bouillon I loved that version growing up (and it’s still a cornerstone of my little sister’s recipe repertoire), but as I’m a semi–New Englander, chowder is a semisacred thing in my book, with a few hard-and-fast rules: All chowders contain dairy (don’t give me none of that Manhattan clam chowder crap), most contain potatoes, and some contain pork—all traditional and inexpensive New England products I used to make my corn chowder with bacon, the most readily available cured pork product at the supermarket, but I was never too happy with its dominating smoky flavor, so I switched over to unsmoked salt pork, which adds the characteristic porkiness without overpowering the sweet corn And some days, when I’m trying to feel extra valorous or have simply let my freezer run empty, I’ll forgo the pork altogether Most chowder recipes call for sweating some onions in butter, adding your corn kernels, potatoes, and dairy, and letting it cook down As it cooks, the potatoes release some starch, thickening up the broth None of this bothers me What does bother me is what goes into the trash: the stripped corncobs Anyone else out there go for two or three rounds on their corn on the cob just to suck at the little bits of sweet milk left in the cob after you’ve eaten the kernels? Like the crispy fat around a rib bone, that’s the tastiest part Why would you want to throw it away? Instead, I use the corn-milking technique here: scraping out the milky liquid from the cobs with the back of a knife By then infusing your base stock with both the scraped milk and empty corncobs (along with a few aromatics like coriander and fennel seed), you can vastly increase the corniness of the finished soup (I mean that in a good way.) It doesn’t take long to infuse the stock—all of 10 minutes, which is just about enough time to sweat off your onions and corn kernels Once you’ve got your corn-milk stock made, the rest is simple: simmer the onion-butter-stockpotato mix until the potatoes are tender, add some milk (I prefer it to cream, as the fattiness of cream can mask some of that sweet corn flavor), and then puree just enough of it ... As it cooks, the potatoes release some starch, thickening up the broth None of this bothers me What does bother me is what goes into the trash: the stripped corncobs Anyone else out there go for two or three rounds on their... Anyone else out there go for two or three rounds on their corn on the cob just to suck at the little bits of sweet milk left in the cob after you’ve eaten the kernels? Like the crispy fat around a rib bone, that’s the tastiest part... I use the corn-milking technique here: scraping out the milky liquid from the cobs with the back of a knife By then infusing your base stock with both the scraped milk and empty corncobs (along with