Name: Green Corn on Cob
Ingredients: fresh corn on the cob; 1 tablespoon sugar (if not entirely fresh)

Why it works: Corn and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,168 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Green Corn on Cob

Ingredients

fresh corn on the cob
1 tablespoon sugar (if not entirely fresh)

Directions

Prepare

Strip off the husks and remove all silk from the corn.

Cook and serve

Boil water in a pot and add the corn.
If the corn is not entirely fresh, add 1 tablespoon of sugar to the water, but do not add salt.
Boil the corn for 20 minutes.
Serve the corn on a napkin.

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 + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,168 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

Corn: Its kernels cook in boiling water, becoming tender and sweet as their starches soften.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to corn that has lost some of its natural sugar.

“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.