Name: Canned Corn
Ingredients: 9 cups corn; 1 cup coarse sea salt; 1 cup granulated sugar; 1 cup water

Why it works: Corn and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,168 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Canned Corn

Ingredients

9 cups corn
1 cup coarse sea salt
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup water

Directions

Make and seal

Combine corn, coarse sea salt, granulated sugar, and water in a pot.
Cook the mixture together until heated through.
Pour the hot mixture into glass jars and seal them.

Use

To use, soak the corn in water until it tastes fresh, then cook and season as desired.

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 + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corn: Is the main vegetable that is preserved and later cooked and seasoned.
Granulated sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the salt in the brine.
Coarse sea salt: Seasons the corn and helps preserve it in the brine.

“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.