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Corn Soup

A creamy corn soup made with butter, flour, milk, and egg, served 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 soup

  1. Combine corn, onion, butter, and flour in a saucepan.

  2. Add milk.

  3. Bring to a boil for 10 minutes.

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

  5. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  6. Strain back into the saucepan.

  7. Bring to a boil again.

  8. Remove from heat immediately to prevent curdling.

Serve

  1. Serve 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 body of the soup.
Egg
Thickens the soup when gently heated, giving it a richer, creamier texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and adds creaminess and mild sweetness.
Flour
Helps thicken the soup as it cooks with the milk and corn.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture over the beaten egg while stirring briskly. Adding hot liquid to egg slowly while stirring constantly tempers it, so the egg warms gradually instead of scrambling. Stirring spreads the heat evenly and keeps the egg proteins from clumping, and the soup must then avoid overheating to prevent curdling.

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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