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Corn Soup

A soup made from corn kernels, butter, flour, and sweet milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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

  1. Cut the kernels off the corn.

  2. Scrape the cob well.

  3. Boil the corn in the water for 1.5 hours.

  4. Mash the corn through a colander.

Make the sauce and finish

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter.

  2. Stir in the flour until smooth but not brown.

  3. Add the sweet milk to the butter mixture and stir well.

  4. Combine the milk mixture with the corn and bring to a boil.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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 flavor and body of the soup as it is cooked and mashed.
Butter
Carries fat that blends with the flour to form the base of the thickened sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk mixture so the soup becomes smooth and creamy.
Sweet milk
Adds richness and creaminess, softening the soup's texture.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour until smooth but not brown. Flour must be cooked gently in the butter to remove its raw taste and to thicken evenly without lumps. Browning changes the flavor and color, and too little stirring lets lumps form when the milk is added.

“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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