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Corn Soup

A creamy corn soup made with corn, water, milk, butter, flour, salt, pepper, egg yolk, and onion juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Cook the corn with the cold water for 10 minutes.

  2. Make a white sauce using the butter and flour.

  3. Add the corn and onion juice to the white sauce, strain, and reheat.

  4. Beat the yolk of the egg, then pour the soup slowly over it, mixing well.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Corn + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,205 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

Corn
Provides the main body, sweetness and flavour of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and carries flavour in the white sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a white sauce, giving the soup body.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the white sauce and adds softness to the soup.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the soup when tempered into it, adding richness.

The step that matters

Pour the soup slowly over the beaten yolk. Egg yolk thickens when heated, but added to hot liquid all at once it scrambles into lumps. Pouring slowly while mixing well warms the yolk gradually so it blends smoothly.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, milk, butter, flour, egg, onion):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, milk, butter, flour, egg, onion. 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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