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Baked Codfish

A baked codfish dish mixed with potatoes, butter, milk, and flour, topped with butter and flour, served with a drawn butter sauce and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Baked Codfish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Soak, boil, and pick the salt fish as for fish balls.

  2. Mix the fish with an equal quantity of mashed or chopped potatoes, butter, and enough warm milk to make it soft.

Bake

  1. Transfer the mixture to a buttered dish.

  2. Rub butter over the top. Sprinkle with sifted flour.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 30 minutes until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Prepare a drawn butter sauce.

  2. Add sliced hard-boiled eggs.

  3. Serve in a gravy boat.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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 fish
Provides the main savoury flavour and the flaked body of the dish.
Potatoes
Add starch and bulk, giving the mixture a soft, moist texture.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the top turn golden in the oven.
Warm milk
Softens the mixture and adds moisture so it bakes tender rather than dry.
Sifted flour
Dusted on top, it helps the surface brown during baking.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a firm, creamy texture to the finished dish.

The step that matters

Mixing the fish with potato and milk. Enough warm milk must be added so the mixture is soft and moist; if it is too stiff, the baked dish will turn dry and crumbly rather than tender.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, milk, flour, sauce, egg):

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Potatothe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, milk, flour, sauce, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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