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 ↓
Green Corn
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the corn
Clean the corn by removing the silk.
Cut off the edge of the kernels with a sharp knife and scrape the remainder off.
Cook and finish
Place the corn in a pot with 2 cups of water.
Cook until the corn is tender, being careful not to burn it.
Thin the corn with sweet milk as needed.
Season with salt and pepper, then add butter to taste.
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.
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Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Corn + milktop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together6,955 recipes
Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).
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Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together5,324 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together7,345 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
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Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Green corn
- Provides the sweet, starchy base that gives the dish its body and flavor.
- Sweet milk
- Adds moisture and richness, loosening the corn into a creamier consistency.
- Butter
- Adds fat and richness, rounding out flavor and smoothing the texture.
The step that matters
Cooking the corn without burning it. Starches and sugars in the corn can scorch on the bottom of the pot when water runs low or heat is too high. Scorching adds bitter, burnt flavors, so the corn should be stirred and cooked gently until tender.
“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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