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Canned Corn Stew

A stew made with canned corn, fat salt pork, water, milk, butter, flour, sugar, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Canned Corn Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Empty the can of corn a few hours before using to remove the 'close' taste.

  2. Chop the fat salt pork into tiny pieces.

Make the stew

  1. Place the pork in a pot with the cold water and cover the pot.

  2. Stew the pork over low heat for 1 hour.

  3. Add pepper and the corn, then cook for 20 minutes.

  4. Dissolve the butter in the hot milk with the flour, then pour the mixture into the pot along with the sugar.

  5. Simmer for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep dish.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Corn + porktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,069 recipes

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

  3. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 main body and sweetness of the stew.
Fat salt pork
Releases fat and savory flavor into the water as it stews.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so it lends body to the stew.
Milk
Adds creaminess and richness to the stew's liquid.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the flour blend smoothly into the milk.

The step that matters

Dissolving the flour into the hot milk. Flour added directly to hot liquid can clump. Dissolving it with the butter first lets the starch disperse evenly, so the stew thickens smoothly instead of becoming lumpy.

“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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