Name: To Boil Green Indian Corn
Ingredients: ears of green Indian corn; coarse sea salt; melted butter

Why it works: Corn and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,345 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

To Boil Green Indian Corn

Ingredients

ears of green Indian corn
coarse sea salt
melted butter

Directions

Prepare

Strip away the sheath and remove the long silken fibers from the tops of the corn.

Boil and serve

Put the corn into boiling water salted as for asparagus.
Boil for about 30 minutes.
Drain well and serve on toast with melted butter.

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.

Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ears of green indian corn: Forms the whole dish; boiling softens the kernels and gelatinizes their starch.
Melted butter: Adds fat and richness that carries the corn's sweet flavor.

“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.