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Corn Soup

A creamy soup made with corn, onion, butter, flour, milk, and egg, served hot with oyster crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, combine corn, onion, butter, and flour.

  2. Add milk and bring to a boil for 10 minutes.

Add the egg

  1. Pour the mixture over the beaten egg while stirring briskly.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the soup back into the saucepan and bring to a boil briefly.

  2. Remove from heat immediately to prevent curdling.

  3. Serve hot with small oyster crackers.

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

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Corn
Provides the main sweet flavor and the body of the soup.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the soup is built on.
Egg
Thickens the soup as it sets when stirred into the hot liquid.
Flour
Thickens the base slightly, giving the soup a smoother body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor through the soup.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot mixture over the beaten egg while stirring briskly. Adding hot liquid to the egg while stirring constantly spreads the heat evenly and keeps the egg from scrambling into lumps. Once the egg is in the soup, overheating causes curdling, so the soup must be removed from heat promptly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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