Name: To Fry Cod
Ingredients: Cod fish (thin part about the tail); Cooking fat (beef, fresh pork dripping, or mutton fat)

Why it works: Fish and beef match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 223 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, wheat, fish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Cod fish (thin part about the tail)
Cooking fat (beef, fresh pork dripping, or mutton fat)

Also mentioned in the method: egg, breadcrumbs

Directions

Split the thin part of the cod close to the bone.
Fry the cod in your chosen cooking fat without using egg or breadcrumbs.
Serve the fried cod plain.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Fish + beeftop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together223 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cod: Forms the main body of the dish; its flaky flesh cooks through in the hot fat.
Cooking fat: Conducts heat to cook the fish and adds richness and browning to its surface.

“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.