Skip to main content
Main

Green Corn Soup

A soup of green corn, carrot, turnip, onion, and parsley, simmered with butter and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Green Corn Soup

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Green Corn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the sliced carrot, turnip, and onion, and fry until light brown.

  3. In a saucepan, combine the corn and water, then stir in the fried vegetables.

  4. Let the mixture gently simmer for about 2 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, add pepper, salt, and chopped parsley.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that carries flavour and helps the vegetables brown lightly when fried.
Onion
Frying gives it browning and sweetness, adding depth to the soup base.
Green corn
Main body of the soup, giving sweetness and a thick, starchy texture as it simmers.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and body to the soup as it cooks down.
Turnip
Adds earthy flavour and body to the soup as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Simmering the mixture gently for about 2 hours. A gentle simmer lets the vegetables soften fully and their starches and sugars blend into the liquid, while a hard boil can scorch the base on the bottom of the pan and make the texture uneven.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, carrot, turnip, parsley, pepper, butter):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, carrot, turnip, parsley, pepper, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Corn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Corn SoupCream of Corn Soup50 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipes