Name: Green Corn and Green Peppers
Ingredients: 4 ears corn; 2 green peppers; 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt

Why it works: Corn and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,324 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Green Corn and Green Peppers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Boil corn in salted water for 20 minutes.
Cut corn from the cob.
Halve the peppers and remove the lining and seeds.
Drop peppers into boiling water while corn cooks.
Once corn is cut, season with butter, black pepper, and coarse sea salt.
Set seasoned corn over hot water.

Combine and serve

When peppers are tender, remove from heat.
Cut peppers into small pieces.
Mix pepper pieces with corn.
Let stand until blended.
Serve in pepper cups or pour into a baking dish.

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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,324 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,345 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn: Provides the main sweet, tender body of the dish.
Green peppers: Add crisp-tender texture and a fresh, slightly bitter vegetable flavour.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and coating the corn.

“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.