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
Cut the corn from the cobs and boil the cobs in water for at least 1 hour.
Add the corn grains and boil until thoroughly cooked; the water will reduce to 3 quarts.
Stir in the milk, beaten eggs, salt, and pepper, then continue boiling for a while longer.
Mix the butter with the flour and stir it into the soup to thicken it.
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.
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Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Corn + milktop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together6,955 recipes
Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).
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Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together5,324 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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 main body and sweet flavour of the soup.
- Milk
- Adds creaminess and richness to the soup base.
- Eggs
- Help enrich and slightly thicken the soup as they cook.
- Flour
- Thickens the soup when cooked with butter and stirred in.
- Butter
- Adds fat and richness, and helps form the flour thickener.
The step that matters
Adding the butter and flour mixture. Flour stirred directly into hot liquid can form lumps. Mixing it with butter first coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly and thicken the soup smoothly.
“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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