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Green Corn Soup

A soup made with corn, veal, butter, flour, and salted water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Green Corn Soup

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Green Corn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Boil 3 quarts of water with 3 teaspoons of coarse sea salt.

  2. Cut the corn off the ears.

  3. Add the corn to the boiling water.

  4. Add a knuckle of veal to the pot.

  5. Cook until the veal is tender.

Thicken and finish

  1. Roll 1 ounce of butter in flour.

  2. Add the butter-flour mixture to the soup before serving.

  3. If the water has boiled away too much, add a little more.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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
Provides the main body and sweet flavour of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it is stirred in with the butter.

The step that matters

Adding the butter-flour mixture. Flour clumps if dropped in raw. Rolling it in butter coats the grains so they disperse and thicken the soup smoothly instead of forming lumps.

“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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