Skip to main content
Dessert

Extra Fine Corn Balls

Sweet corn balls made by coating popped corn with a sugar glaze flavored with orange, lemon, or rose.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Corn and orange work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 586 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Extra Fine Corn Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve gum arabic in water.

  2. Add confectioners' sugar and boil, stirring constantly until thick.

  3. Flavor the mixture with your choice of orange, lemon, or rose.

Form the balls

  1. Pour the syrup over freshly popped corn until it adheres.

  2. Form the mixture into balls and set aside to harden.

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. Corn + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Gum arabic
Acts as a binder that helps the syrup cling to the popped corn and harden as it sets.
Confectioners' sugar
Dissolves and cooks into a thick syrup that sweetens and forms the coating.
Freshly popped corn
Provides the base that the syrup coats and holds together as balls.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar syrup until thick. Stirring constantly prevents the sugar from scorching on the bottom of the pan. The syrup must reach a thick consistency, because it sets as it cools and hardens around the corn, so a thin syrup will not hold the balls together.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, corn):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, corn. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesCorn CakeCorn Cake90 recipes