Name: Green Corn Boiled in Milk
Ingredients: 4 ears of green corn; ½ cup skimmed milk; ½ cup water; ¼ teaspoon salt

Why it works: Corn and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Green Corn Boiled in Milk

Ingredients

4 ears of green corn
½ cup skimmed milk
½ cup water
¼ teaspoon salt

Directions

Prepare

Remove the husks and silk from the corn.

Cook

In a pot, combine skimmed milk, water, and salt.
Bring the mixture to a boil.
Add the corn and cook until tender.
Drain the corn.

Serve

Serve wrapped in a napkin.

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.

Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,955 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Green corn: Provides the main body and sweet flavor of the dish.
Skimmed milk: Forms the cooking liquid that gives the corn a creamy, mild coating.

“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.