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Sweet Corn in White Sauce

A simple dish of sweet corn simmered in a thick white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Sweet Corn in White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the white sauce

  1. Prepare the thick white sauce by melting the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for a minute.

  3. Gradually add the milk, stirring until thickened.

Combine and heat

  1. Combine the corn with the white sauce.

  2. Heat the mixture in a chafing dish until warm.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 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

Corn
Provides the sweet flavour and the main body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded flavour.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a white sauce by swelling as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens when heated with flour.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter before adding milk. Cooking the flour briefly in melted butter coats the starch grains with fat, so they disperse smoothly in the milk instead of clumping. Stirring while adding the milk keeps the sauce lump-free as the starch swells and thickens.

“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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