Name: Maize Porridge
Ingredients: 1 cup maize (corn); ½ cup water; sour milk (for serving)

Why it works: Corn and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Maize Porridge

Ingredients

1 cup maize (corn)
½ cup water
sour milk (for serving)

Directions

Cook the maize

Place the maize in a covered earthenware pot with water.
Cook over a wood fire until partially softened.

Make the porridge

Pound the maize and roll it on a flat stone until it forms a soft paste or porridge.

Serve

Serve with a wooden spoon and sour milk.

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 + milktop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,955 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Maize (corn): Forms the main body of the porridge, thickening into a soft paste when cooked and pounded.
Water: Softens the maize during cooking so it can be pounded into a paste.

“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.