Name: Vegetable Oyster Soup
Ingredients: 8 bunches vegetable oysters; 1 cup sweet corn; ¼ pound Nuttolene; Salt to taste; Water as needed

Why it works: Oyster and corn work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 250 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Vegetable Oyster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the vegetable oysters until tender, then press them through a colander.
Rub the sweet corn through the colander and the Nuttolene through a fine sieve.
Mix the corn and Nuttolene together, then add the pressed oysters.
Add the cooking liquid from the oysters and enough water to achieve a soup consistency.
Season with salt to taste and heat for 30 to 60 minutes.

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.

Oyster + corntop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together250 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Vegetable oysters: Provide the main body and flavor of the soup once cooked and pressed.
Sweet corn: Adds sweetness and thickens the soup as it is pressed into the base.
Nuttolene: Adds richness and body to the soup through its fat content.

“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.