Name: Mexican Tamales
Ingredients: ripe corn; a little piece of lime; water

Why it works: Corn and lime work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 773 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Mexican Tamales

Ingredients

ripe corn
a little piece of lime
water

Directions

Place the ripe corn in a pot with a small piece of lime and enough water to cover it.
Bring to a boil and cook until the corn is tender.

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.

Corn + limetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together773 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe corn: Provides the starch and body that the rest of the dish is built on.
Lime: Adds a little acidity and helps loosen the corn's outer hulls during cooking.

“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.