Name: Boiled Corn
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon sugar; corn; salt

Why it works: Sugar and corn 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 ↓

Boiled Corn

Ingredients

1 tablespoon sugar
corn
salt

Directions

Bring a pot of water to a boil.
Add 1 tablespoon of sugar and the corn.
Boil for 20 minutes.
Remove the corn and sprinkle with salt before serving.

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.

Sugar + corntop 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: Is the main ingredient, cooked whole in boiling water until tender and sweet.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to the corn as it cooks in the water.

“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.