Name: Stewed Corn
Ingredients: 1 can of corn; boiling water; hot milk; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 1 tablespoon butter, cut into thirds and rolled in flour; pepper to taste

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 ↓

Stewed Corn

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the corn

Open a can of corn and let it sit for an hour before cooking.
Put the corn in a saucepan and cover it with boiling water.
Let it stand for 10 minutes without cooking.
Drain the water and cover the corn with hot milk and salt.

Cook and serve

Set the saucepan in a vessel of hot water and cook for 30 minutes or until tender.
Stir in the butter and simmer for 10 minutes.
Add pepper to taste and transfer to a deep covered dish.

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.

Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,955 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).
Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,324 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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

Corn: Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender as it cooks gently in milk.
Milk: Provides moisture and a creamy, rich texture as the corn stews.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, giving the stewed corn a smooth finish.

“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.