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To Fry Fresh Cod or Haddock

Fried cod or haddock seasoned with pepper, coarse sea salt, and cornmeal, cooked in butter and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Haddock and butter work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 764 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

To Fry Fresh Cod or Haddock

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the fish into pieces that are 3 inches wide.

  2. Season the fish pieces with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Roll the seasoned fish in cornmeal.

Cook

  1. Fry the fish in a mixture of hot butter and lard.

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. Haddock + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together764 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Haddock + peppertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together696 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh cod or haddock
Forms the flaky, tender main body of the dish.
Cornmeal
Forms a crisp, golden coating that browns as it fries.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the coating brown in the hot fat.
Lard
Adds a high-heat frying fat that supports a crisp, even crust.

The step that matters

Frying in hot butter and lard. If the fat is not hot enough, the cornmeal coating absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of crisp, and the fish steams rather than fries.

“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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