Name: Corn and Tomatoes
Ingredients: young green corn; peeled and quartered tomatoes

Why it works: Corn and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,099 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn and Tomatoes

Ingredients

young green corn
peeled and quartered tomatoes

Directions

Prepare and cook

Cut the corn from the cob.
In a kettle, combine the corn with twice the quantity of tomatoes.
Bring to a boil and cook until the tomatoes are soft.

Preserve

Can the mixture for preservation.

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 + tomatotop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,099 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

Young green corn: Provides the sweet flavor and tender texture that define the dish.
Peeled and quartered tomatoes: Supply moisture and acidity, and soften into the sauce that binds the dish.

“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.