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Corn Soup

A creamy soup made from ground corn, onion, milk, cream, butter, and flour, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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

Prepare the corn

  1. Grind the corn and onion using a meat grinder.

  2. In a pot, combine the ground corn and onion with 1 pint of water and simmer for 20 minutes.

Make the soup

  1. In a double boiler, scald 1 pint of milk.

  2. Thicken the milk with 1 tablespoon of butter and 2 tablespoons of flour.

  3. Add the corn mixture and 1 cup of cream to the thickened milk.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and a dash of pepper.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corn
Provides the main body and sweet corn flavour of the soup.
Milk
Forms the creamy base that the soup is built on.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the thickened milk base.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, body-giving base.
Cream
Adds fat and a smoother, richer texture to the soup.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk with butter and flour. Flour must be cooked into the butter and milk to avoid lumps and a raw starchy taste; whisking it in gradually keeps the base smooth before the corn is added.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

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