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Corn Porridge

A warm dish made from young corn, milk, butter, flour, and egg yolks, optionally sweetened with sugar and nutmeg.

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 ↓

Corn Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the grain from the cob of young corn and measure it.

  2. For each heaping pint of corn, use nearly 1 quart of milk.

Cook

  1. Combine the corn and milk in a pot, stir well, and boil until the corn is soft.

  2. Add bits of fresh butter dredged with flour and boil for 5 more minutes.

  3. Stir in beaten egg yolks and remove from heat after 3 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot, stirring in fresh butter, and add sugar and nutmeg if desired.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Corn + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

Young corn
Provides the main body and sweet flavour of the porridge.
Milk
Cooks with the corn to form the creamy, liquid base of the porridge.
Flour
Coats the butter pieces and helps thicken the porridge as it boils.
Egg yolks
Stirred in at the end to enrich and thicken the porridge.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stir in beaten egg yolks and remove from heat after 3 minutes. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can curdle or turn grainy if they boil. Removing the pot from heat promptly keeps the porridge smooth and creamy.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, milk, butter, flour, egg, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Turmericfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, milk, butter, flour, egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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