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Green Corn on the Ear

A simple boiled green corn on the ear served with butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,324 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Green Corn on the Ear

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Remove silk from the corn.

  2. Boil water in a pot and add the salt.

  3. Add the corn to the boiling water.

  4. Cook for 15 minutes if very young; longer for older corn.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with butter, pepper, and additional salt to taste.

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

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

  2. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Young corn
Provides the sweet, tender kernels that form the body of the dish.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water so the corn is flavoured as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour over the hot kernels.

The step that matters

Cooking time for the corn. Very young corn cooks through quickly, while older corn has tougher, starchier kernels that need longer. Checking tenderness rather than relying only on the minute count keeps the kernels from turning tough or mushy.

“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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