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Pop-corn Soup

A creamy corn soup flavored with onion, butter, flour, and bay leaf, served with popcorn.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Pop-corn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put the milk, bay leaf, and onion into a double boiler over medium heat.

  2. Score each ear of corn down the center with a sharp knife and add to the milk.

Thicken and serve

  1. Rub the butter and flour together, moisten with a little hot soup to make a paste, and stir into the milk.

  2. Stir constantly for about five minutes or beat with an egg beater.

  3. Serve with popcorn instead of wafers.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that gives the soup its body and richness.
Corn
Adds natural sweetness and starch that help thicken and flavor the soup.
Flour
Its starch thickens the hot milk as it swells, giving the soup body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and coats the flour so it blends without clumping.
Onion
Provides aromatic savory flavor that infuses the milk as it heats.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour paste into the milk. Flour clumps if added dry or unstirred. Moistening it into a smooth paste first and stirring constantly lets the starch disperse and thicken evenly as the milk heats.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, butter, milk, flour, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, butter, milk, flour, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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