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Chicken and Corn Soup

A soup made with boiled chicken broth, corn, milk, butter, and flour.

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

Chicken and Corn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skim the liquor from boiled chickens and heat it in a pot.

Make the soup

  1. Add the corn cobs and boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the cobs and add the corn, then stew for 40 minutes.

  3. In a separate bowl, stir the butter and flour into the hot milk until smooth.

  4. Add the milk mixture to the soup, season with salt and pepper, and serve.

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. Milk + buttertop 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. Chicken + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  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 flavour and body of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the soup a smoother mouthfeel.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the milk mixture so it lends body to the soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and mild sweetness, softened by the flour thickening.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the hot milk. Stirring the flour into hot milk until smooth prevents lumps. Flour needs to be fully dispersed before it meets the hot soup so it thickens evenly.

“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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