Skip to main content
Preserve

To Preserve Corn

Corn preserved by brining with salt, boiled, drained, and seasoned with butter, cream, sugar, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Preserve Corn

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the corn

  1. Cut the corn from the cob and place it in an earthen jar, adding ½ cup of salt for every 6 cups of corn.

  2. Cover the corn with the inside leaves of the husk.

Freshen the corn

  1. Boil a large kettle of water.

  2. Squeeze the brine from the corn and add it to the boiling water without rinsing.

  3. Boil until the water is quite salty.

  4. Have a kettle of boiling water ready to pour over the corn after draining the salt water.

  5. Change the water until the corn is sufficiently freshened.

Season and serve

  1. Season with butter, cream, a little sugar, and pepper.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn
Is the main food being preserved; salting and soaking shape its texture and flavor.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the corn and preserves it by creating a salty brine.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that give the freshened corn a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Cream
Adds fat and body, making the seasoned corn richer and softer.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness that balances the saltiness left after soaking.

The step that matters

Changing the water until the corn is freshened. Salt must be removed gradually by repeated soaking in fresh water; too little change leaves the corn overly salty, while rinsing too early can leave it under-seasoned or spoil. Judge by taste rather than time.

“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.

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes