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Luncheon Corn

A dish of corn kernels boiled in milk, seasoned with sugar, salt, paprika, and butter, served with buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Luncheon Corn

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. If the corn is a little old, cut it off the cob by scoring down the middle of each row with a sharp knife and slicing off the tips of the kernels.

Cook

  1. Cook the corn in the milk for five minutes after it begins to boil, using just enough milk to cover or moisten well.

  2. Season with salt, paprika, sugar, and butter or margarine.

Serve

  1. Dip the corn into a shallow dish lined with hot, thin, buttered toast.

  2. Garnish with toast points standing up around the edge and place a sprig of parsley between the points.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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 and provides its sweet, starchy flavour and texture.
Milk
Cooks the corn gently and keeps it moist while adding richness to the cooking liquid.
Butter or margarine
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, mellow mouthfeel.
Sugar
Enhances the natural sweetness of the corn.
Toast
Soaks up the creamy liquid at serving, giving a soft, flavourful base under the corn.

The step that matters

Cook the corn in the milk for five minutes after it begins to boil. Milk scorches and can boil over easily, so keeping the heat moderate and the timing short prevents scorching and curdling while the corn stays tender and sweet.

“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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