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Old Fashioned Hulled Corn

A dish of corn kernels boiled in lye, then simmered until soft, served hot or cold with cream or milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,532 recipes. Both carry 2-heptanol, which smells bitter, floral. The science ↓

Old Fashioned Hulled Corn

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell the corn and place it in an iron kettle covered with cold water.

  2. Add the bag of wood ashes and boil until the corn looks yellow and tastes strongly of alkali.

Make the hominy

  1. Remove the bag and boil the corn in the lye for over an hour.

  2. Pour off the lye, add fresh water, and simmer until the corn swells.

  3. If hulls do not come off by stirring, turn off the water and rub them off with a towel.

  4. Add more water and simmer for 3 to 4 hours, stirring often to prevent burning.

  5. When the corn swells and becomes soft and white, add salt to taste and let the water simmer away.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold with cream or milk.

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 + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe, dry corn
Its starchy kernels swell and soften into hominy once treated with alkali.
Wood ashes
Their alkali loosens the hulls and softens the kernels during long boiling.

The step that matters

Stirring while the corn simmers for 3 to 4 hours. Corn sticks and scorches on the bottom of the kettle during long simmering, so stirring often prevents burning and an off, scorched taste.

“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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