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Sugar Corn, Stewed

Stewed sugar corn in milk with butter, flour, sugar, and salt.

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

Sugar Corn, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour the milk into a saucepan and bring it to a boil.

  2. Cut the corn off the cob and add it to the boiling milk.

  3. Stir in the sugar and salt.

  4. Mix the butter with the flour and stir it into the corn mixture.

  5. Once it boils again, let it cook for 5 minutes.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

Sugar corn
Provides the main body and natural sweetness of the dish.
Rich sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the corn simmers in, adding richness and moisture.
Butter and flour
Flour thickens the milk as the butter carries flavour and gives the sauce a smooth body.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture. Flour needs to be fully blended with the butter before stirring in, and the mixture must boil again so the starch cooks through. Otherwise the sauce can stay floury or lumpy.

“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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