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Corn Soup

A creamy soup made with corn, milk, butter, onion, flour, egg yolks, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Prepare the corn

  1. Mash the corn in a wooden bowl until fine.

Make the soup

  1. Combine corn and milk in a double boiler and cook for 15 minutes.

  2. In a frying pan, melt butter and cook onion slowly for 10 minutes.

  3. Add flour to the onion mixture without browning, then stir into the milk.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, and cook for an additional 10 minutes.

  5. Beat the egg yolks with ½ pint of cold milk and stir into the soup.

  6. Cook for 1 minute 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.

  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. Pepper + oniontop 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 base of the soup.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and creamy richness of the soup.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the onion and flour base.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the milk.
Egg yolks
Enriches and thickens the soup when stirred in and heated.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by setting when heated. Beat them with cold milk first so they blend smoothly, then add them gently to the hot soup and avoid boiling, which can curdle the yolks.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, milk, butter, flour, pepper, egg. 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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