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Soup

Corn Soup

A creamy soup made with corn, milk, butter, flour, egg yolks, onion, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Corn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Mash the corn in a bowl.

  2. Cook the mashed corn with 1 quart of milk for 15 minutes after it reaches boiling point.

  3. In a small pan, cook the butter and onion for a few minutes.

  4. Add the flour to the butter and onion, stirring until smooth.

  5. Stir the butter mixture into the corn and milk.

  6. Add salt and pepper, and cook for an additional 10 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the soup, then stir in the well-beaten egg yolks and serve.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid body of the soup and carries the corn flavour.
Corn
Provides the main flavour and, when mashed, thickens the soup with starch.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and carries the flavour of the onion.
Flour
Thickens the soup by absorbing liquid as it cooks with the butter.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the soup when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by coagulating when heated. If the soup is too hot when they go in, or they are added without being well beaten, they can scramble or leave streaks. Straining first and adding them off the heat keeps the soup smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, corn, butter, flour, egg, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, corn, butter, flour, egg, pepper. 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.

More corn soup recipes

Green 46Chicken 11Sweet 4Cream 3Creamed 3Creole 3 See all 204 →

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