Name: Chicken and Corn Pie
Ingredients: 1 cooked chicken, seasoned; 10 ears of sweet corn, cut off; Chicken soup (enough to cover); Coarse sea salt (to taste)

Why it works: Chicken and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,666 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Chicken and Corn Pie

Ingredients

1 cooked chicken, seasoned
10 ears of sweet corn, cut off
Chicken soup (enough to cover)
Coarse sea salt (to taste)

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Assemble and bake

In a pan, layer half of the corn, followed by the chicken, then the remaining corn, making sure the top layer is corn.
Pour the chicken soup over the layers.
Bake for 30 minutes.

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.

Chicken + corntop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,666 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken: Provides the main protein and savory body of the pie filling.
Sweet corn: Adds sweetness and tender texture to the layers.
Chicken soup: Supplies moisture and seasoning that keeps the layers from drying out as they bake.

“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.