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Corn Soup

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 stock

  1. Cut the corn from the cob.

  2. Boil the cobs in water for at least 1 hour.

  3. Add the corn grains.

  4. Boil until thoroughly cooked, reducing the water to 3 quarts.

Finish and thicken

  1. Stir in the milk, beaten eggs, salt, and pepper.

  2. Continue boiling for a while longer.

  3. Mix the butter with the flour.

  4. Stir it in to thicken the soup.

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
Gives the soup its main flavour, natural sweetness and body from its starch.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a soft, mildly sweet richness to the soup.
Eggs
Beaten eggs set gently in the hot soup, adding richness and body.
Flour
Its starch swells when heated, thickening the soup.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and carries flavour, and helps the flour blend smoothly.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter and flour mixture. Mixing the butter and flour together first lets the starch coat evenly. Stirred into hot liquid, it thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps, because the starch grains swell as they heat.

“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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