Name: Sweet Corn Soup
Ingredients: 12 ears of corn, raw; 1 quart water; 1 quart milk or cream; 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; 1 tablespoon flour (optional); crackers (for serving)

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 ↓

Sweet Corn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the corn stock

Split the grain of the corn and scrape off the kernels.
Boil the corn cobs in water for 10 minutes.
Strain the water and reserve 1 quart.

Make the soup

Add the reserved water and 1 quart of milk or cream to a pot.
Season with butter, salt, and pepper, and cook for 15 minutes.
If desired, thicken the soup with 1 tablespoon of flour.

Serve

Serve hot with crackers.

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.

Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,955 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).
Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,324 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,165 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: Provides the sweet flavor and body of the soup, with starch from the kernels and cobs.
Milk or cream: Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the broth.
Butter: Adds fat for a rounder, richer mouthfeel and flavor.
Flour: Thickens the soup by gelatinizing its starch when heated in the liquid.

“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.