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
Grate or slit the grains and scrape the corn from the cobs.
Make the soup
Boil the cobs in 1 pint of water for 20 minutes.
Remove the cobs.
Add the corn and boil for 15 minutes.
Stir in 1 quart of rich milk, seasoning with salt, pepper, and butter.
Boil the mixture for 10 minutes.
Finish and serve
In a tureen, beat the yolks of 3 eggs and pour the soup over them.
For a thicker soup, rub 1 tablespoon of flour into the butter before adding.
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.
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Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Corn + milktop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together6,955 recipes
Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).
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Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together5,324 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Sweet corn
- Provides the main body and sweet corn flavour of the soup.
- Rich milk
- Forms the creamy base and adds richness and smoothness to the soup.
- Egg yolks
- Thicken the soup gently and add richness when poured in at the end.
- Flour
- Thickens the soup slightly when rubbed into butter before adding.
The step that matters
Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated, but if the soup is too hot when poured over them, they can scramble into lumps. Beating them well and adding the hot soup gradually helps keep the texture smooth.
“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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