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Canned Corn

A preserved sweet corn product made by boiling corn with tartaric acid, soda, sugar, butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,324 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Canned Corn

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dissolve tartaric acid in water.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of the mixture to 2 quarts of sweet corn.

Cook and can

  1. Cook the corn until boiling hot.

  2. Fill tin cans with the hot corn.

  3. Turn the corn into a colander.

  4. Rinse with cold water.

Season

  1. Add a little soda and sugar while cooking.

  2. Season with butter, pepper, and salt.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. 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

Tartaric acid
Adds acidity, lowering the pH to help preserve the corn.
Sweet corn
Main vegetable that supplies the body and natural sweetness of the dish.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the finished corn.

The step that matters

Add 1 tablespoon of the acid mixture to the corn. Tartaric acid lowers the pH of the corn. Measuring the acid accurately matters because acidity is what helps keep home-canned low-acid vegetables safe to store.

“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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