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Corn Soup

A creamy soup made from corn, milk, butter, flour, and egg yolks, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Corn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the corn stock

  1. Scrape the corn from the cobs.

  2. Boil the cobs in 1 quart of water for 20 minutes.

  3. Remove the cobs and add the corn to the water.

  4. Boil for 10 minutes, then add 2 quarts of rich milk.

Finish the soup

  1. In a bowl, rub ½ pound of butter with 2 tablespoons of flour.

  2. Season the mixture with salt and pepper.

  3. Add the butter and flour mixture to the soup and boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Serve in a tureen over the well-beaten yolks of 3 eggs.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 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

Corn
Provides the main flavour and body of the soup as it simmers in the water.
Rich milk
Adds creaminess and richness, softening the soup's texture.
Butter
Adds fat and smooth richness, rounding out the flavour of the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it boils with the butter.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the soup when stirred into the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can curdle if the soup is boiling hot. Well-beaten yolks should be added to the tureen over the soup as it is served, keeping the liquid hot but not boiling, so the soup turns smooth rather than grainy.

“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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