Skip to main content
Main

Milk or Cream Codfish

A codfish dish simmered in milk or cream, seasoned with butter, pepper, and thickened with flour or corn starch, served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Milk or Cream Codfish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the codfish

  1. Freshen the salt codfish by boiling it in a basin of cold water, then draining it.

  2. Repeat the boiling process if the fish is still very salty.

Make the sauce

  1. Once drained, pour ½ cup of milk or thin cream over the codfish.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of butter and ¼ teaspoon of pepper.

  3. Mix 1 teaspoon of flour or corn‑starch with a little milk to make a thickening.

  4. Add the thickening to the codfish mixture and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve over a slice of toasted bread.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Salt codfish
Provides the main savoury flavour and the flaky texture of the dish.
Milk or thin cream
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds richness and moisture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel in the sauce.
Flour or corn-starch
Thickens the milk so the sauce becomes creamy rather than watery.

The step that matters

Freshening the salt codfish. Salt cod is preserved heavily in salt, so boiling it in fresh water draws out salt. Skipping or shortening this leaves the dish too salty, since the salt does not dissolve out on its own in the sauce.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes