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Soup

Corn Soup

A creamy soup made from boiled corn, milk, butter, flour, eggs, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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

Make the soup

  1. Boil the corn and cob in enough water to cover them.

  2. Remove most of the corn from the pot.

  3. Add 1 quart of milk to the pot and boil for 30 minutes.

  4. Thicken the soup with butter, flour, pepper, and salt.

Finish and serve

  1. In a soup tureen, beat the eggs well.

  2. Pour the soup into the tureen, stirring constantly.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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 main body and sweet corn flavor of the soup.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that carries the soup's flavor and body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping flavor and smooth the texture.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the butter.
Eggs
Enrich and thicken the soup when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Pour the soup into the tureen, stirring constantly. Adding hot soup to beaten eggs can scramble them. Stirring constantly keeps the egg mixture moving so it blends smoothly and thickens gently instead of curdling.

“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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