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Corn Porridge

A creamy corn porridge made with milk, butter, flour, egg yolk, sugar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the porridge

  1. Combine the corn and milk in a pot and stir well.

  2. Boil until the corn is perfectly soft.

  3. Add the butter dredged with flour.

  4. Boil for an additional 5 minutes.

  5. Stir in the beaten egg yolk.

  6. Remove from heat after 3 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot, stirring in additional butter.

  2. Add sugar and nutmeg if desired.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Corn + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Young corn
Provides the main body and sweet corn flavour of the porridge.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that cooks the corn and creates a creamy texture.
Flour
Dredged onto the butter, it thickens the liquid as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the porridge slightly when stirred in.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten egg yolk. Egg yolk can curdle or scramble if it meets very hot liquid too quickly. Stirring it in gently after removing the pot from full boil, or tempering it first, helps it blend smoothly and thicken evenly.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Turmericfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, milk, flour, butter, egg, sugar. 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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