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Corn Soup

A creamy soup made from corn, milk, butter, flour, onion, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Corn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the corn base

  1. Mash the corn as fine as possible and cook it for 15 minutes in 1 quart of milk in a double boiler.

  2. In a frying pan, cook the onion in the butter for 10 minutes, then add the flour and cook until frothy, without browning.

  3. Stir this mixture into the corn and milk, add salt and pepper, and cook for another 10 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Rub the soup through a fine sieve and return it to the heat.

  2. Beat the egg yolks, add the remaining ½ pint of milk, and stir this into the soup.

  3. Cook for 1 minute longer, stirring constantly, and serve immediately.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Corn
Forms the body and sweet flavour of the soup once mashed and strained.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and, with the flour, a creamy, smooth texture.
Butter
Cooks the onion gently and adds richness to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked briefly in butter before being stirred in.
Egg yolks
Enriches the soup and thickens it gently when stirred in over heat.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat. If the soup boils after they go in, they can scramble and curdle, so keep it hot but not boiling and stir constantly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, milk, butter, flour, egg, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, milk, butter, flour, egg, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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