Name: Green Corn, Boiled
Ingredients: fresh green corn; 1 tablespoon sugar; butter; coarse sea salt (to taste)

Why it works: Corn and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,345 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Green Corn, Boiled

Ingredients

fresh green corn
1 tablespoon sugar
butter
coarse sea salt (to taste)

Directions

Prepare

Strip off the husks and silk from the corn.

Cook

Boil water and add sugar if the corn is not fresh.
Add the corn to the boiling water and cook for 20 minutes.

Serve

Serve the corn with butter and a little salt, in a covered vegetable dish.

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.

Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,345 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh green corn: Its natural sugars and tender kernels make up the whole dish.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to older corn whose sugars have begun turning to starch.
Butter: Adds richness and fat that carries flavor and coats the kernels.

“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.