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Green Corn Stewed

A stew of fresh green corn cooked with butter, flour, milk, salt, and pepper.

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

Green Corn Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the corn

  1. Remove the husks and silk from the corn.

  2. Cut down the center of each row of grains and scrape them out with the back of a knife.

Cook and finish

  1. Put the corn into a saucepan and cover it with boiling water.

  2. Boil the corn for 20 minutes.

  3. Mix the butter and flour to a smooth paste.

  4. Add the butter and flour mixture to the corn along with the milk, salt, and pepper.

  5. Boil again for 3 minutes 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. 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 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

Fresh green corn
Provides the main body and sweet flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that rounds out the milk and corn flavors.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, creamy sauce when cooked with it.
Milk
Adds moisture and creaminess, forming the body of the stewed sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour paste into the corn. Flour mixed as a smooth paste blends evenly into hot liquid; added lumpy or unmixed, it clumps and leaves a grainy texture instead of a smooth thickened sauce.

“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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