Name: Corn Cakes
Ingredients: 1 cup corn; ½ teaspoon salt; 2 teaspoons butter

Why it works: Corn and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,345 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Corn Cakes

Ingredients

1 cup corn
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons butter

Directions

Prepare

If using cold boiled corn, cut it from the cob.
Mix the corn, salt, and butter together.

Cook and serve

Fry in hot butter or drippings, like griddle cakes.
Serve with butter and sugar or syrup.

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.

Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corn: Forms the body of the cakes and provides the main flavor and starch structure.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and helps the cakes brown when fried.

“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.