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Corn Chowder

A creamy corn chowder with potatoes, eggs, and croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 938 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Chowder

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Prepare the potatoes and blanch them for 15 minutes.

  2. Mash the corn with 1 cup cold water.

  3. Add the corn to the potatoes and cook for 5 minutes longer.

  4. Add salt and pepper for seasoning.

Make the chowder

  1. Make a white sauce by melting the butter, adding flour, and whisking in the milk.

  2. Combine the white sauce with the corn and potatoes, and cook for 5 minutes longer.

Garnish and serve

  1. Just before serving, add the hard cooked eggs, cutting the whites into fine dice and rubbing the yolks through a sieve.

  2. Serve with croutons.

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. Corn + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together938 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  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 sweetness and body, and its mashed starch thickens the chowder.
Potatoes
Add starch and bulk, giving the chowder a hearty, creamy texture.
Butter
Enriches the white sauce and carries flavor through the base.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and milk into a smooth white sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the white sauce, adding richness and creaminess.
Hard cooked eggs
Add richness and texture as a garnish, with yolk and white contrasting.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the melted butter. Flour must be cooked into the butter before the milk goes in; otherwise the sauce can clump and turn lumpy instead of smooth. Whisking the milk in steadily keeps the sauce even as it thickens.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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