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Green Corn, Stewed

A simple stew of boiled corn kernels simmered with butter, cream, salt, sugar, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Green Corn, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the corn

  1. Husk the corn and boil it for 10 minutes.

  2. Once cooled, use a sharp knife to cut down each row of kernels.

  3. Press the pulp from the hulls with the back of the knife into a stew pan.

Stew and serve

  1. Add salt, sugar, pepper, butter, and cream or milk to the corn.

  2. Let the mixture simmer for 10 minutes and serve hot.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  4. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn
Forms the main body of the dish, giving it its sweet, starchy base once pressed from the cob.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, which carries flavour and gives the stewed corn a smooth mouthfeel.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture and creaminess, thinning the pulp into a silky stew as it simmers.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the natural sweetness of the corn.

The step that matters

Pressing the pulp from the hulls. Scraping too little leaves tough hulls and fibrous bits in the stew, while the back of the knife is needed to extract the starchy milky pulp that thickens the dish.

“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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