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Boiled Green Corn

Boiled green corn seasoned with butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Boiled Green Corn

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the corn

  1. Choose young sugar corn that is full grown but not hard.

  2. Test by piercing the grain with your nail.

  3. Strip off the outer leaves of the corn.

  4. Carefully turn back the innermost covering.

  5. Remove all threads of silk from the corn.

  6. Re-cover the ear with the thin husk.

  7. Tie the husk at the top with a bit of thread.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil salted water.

  2. Cook the corn rapidly for 20 to 30 minutes, depending on size and age.

  3. Cut off the stalks close to the cob.

  4. Serve whole wrapped in a napkin, or cut from the cob while hot.

  5. Season with butter, pepper, and salt.

  6. Serve in a vegetable 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.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Young sugar-corn
Provides the sweet, tender kernels that are the main substance of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the hot kernels as they are seasoned.

The step that matters

Testing the corn for ripeness. Corn that is too immature has watery, thin kernels, while overly mature corn turns hard and starchy. Piercing the grain with a nail checks that it is full grown but still tender, so the kernels cook to a sweet, pleasant texture.

“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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