Skip to main content
Main

Soup, Cream of Corn

A creamy soup made from corn, water, milk, onion, and seasoned with salt and pepper.

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

Why it works: Onion and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Soup, Cream of Corn

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the margarine in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and cook for a minute.

Cook and serve

  1. Stir in the corn, water, and milk.

  2. Season with salt and white pepper.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Serve hot, garnished with 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.

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. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together943 recipes

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

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,205 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Margarine
Fat that coats the flour so it can thicken smoothly without lumps.
Flour
Starch that thickens the soup as it heats in the liquid.
Corn
Provides the main flavour and natural sweetness, and adds body to the soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a softer, richer mouthfeel to the soup.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the margarine for a minute. Cooking the flour briefly in fat cooks off its raw, pasty taste and helps it disperse evenly. Adding liquid to uncooked flour is more likely to leave lumps and a floury flavour.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, milk, onion, flour, parsley):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, milk, onion, flour, parsley. 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 recipesGreen Corn SoupGreen Corn Soup46 recipesCornmeal GruelCornmeal Gruel41 recipesCornmeal PuddingCornmeal Pudding32 recipes