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
Grate the corn from the ears.
Put the grated corn in a kettle with 1 cup of water and boil for 15 minutes.
Strain the boiled corn.
Make the soup
Heat 1 pint of milk in a double boiler.
Thicken the milk with 1 tablespoon of flour and 1 tablespoon of butter.
Add the strained corn and its liquid to the milk mixture and boil for 5 minutes.
Season and serve
Add ½ teaspoon of salt and pepper to taste in a tureen.
Pour the soup into the tureen and serve hot.
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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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together6,165 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour and butter 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
- Forms the main body of the soup and gives natural sweetness and starchy thickness.
- Milk
- Provides the creamy liquid base and soft, rich texture.
- Flour
- Its starch swells with heat and thickens the milk into a smoother soup.
- Butter
- Adds fat for richness, mouthfeel and a mellow flavor.
The step that matters
Thicken the milk with flour and butter. Flour must be fully dispersed in the fat and warm milk before it thickens, because unmixed starch clumps into lumps that do not dissolve. Stirring keeps the starch even so it swells into a smooth, uniform thickness.
“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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