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Dessert

Corn Cob Syrup

A sweet syrup made by boiling corn cobs with water and sugar, then straining and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,168 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Cob Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the corn liquid

  1. Cut the corn cobs into small pieces.

  2. Boil the cobs in 1 gallon of water until reduced to ½ gallon.

  3. Strain the liquid well.

Make the syrup

  1. Add 2 lbs of brown sugar and 4 lbs of white sugar to the liquid.

  2. Boil for 20 minutes.

  3. Strain into bottles while warm.

Seal and store

  1. Cool, then cork and seal with paraffin.

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. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Red corn cobs
Provide the corn-derived liquid that forms the base of the syrup.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, molasses-like flavor to the syrup.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and body, thickening the syrup as it boils down.

The step that matters

Boiling the liquid down to ½ gallon. Reducing the liquid concentrates the sugars and water content, which affects the syrup's thickness and how well it keeps. Stopping too early leaves it thin; over-reducing makes it too thick.

“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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