Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Corn

A dish of sweet corn stewed with bacon, cream, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Corn and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,324 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Corn

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the corn from the cob.

  2. Fry the bacon until the grease is rendered.

  3. Remove the bacon and add the corn to the frying pan.

Cook and finish

  1. Cover the corn with boiling water and cook for 30 minutes, stirring often to prevent burning.

  2. Before serving, add cream or milk, and season with salt and pepper.

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

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

  2. Cream + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Corn + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

Cream and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 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

Sweet corn
Provides the main body and sweetness of the dish.
Bacon
Its rendered fat adds savory flavor to the corn as it cooks.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and a creamy moisture to the finished corn.

The step that matters

Cook and stir the corn for 30 minutes. Corn sugars and starches can scorch on the bottom of the pan during a long simmer. Stirring often keeps the corn from burning and sticking.

“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.

More stewed corn recipes

and Tomatoes 6 See all 59 →

You might also like

Corn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesCream of Corn SoupCream of Corn Soup50 recipesGreen Corn SoupGreen Corn Soup46 recipesCornmeal GruelCornmeal Gruel41 recipes