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Cod Tongues and Sounds

A dish of soaked cod tongues simmered in milk and water, thickened with a flour-butter paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Cod Tongues and Sounds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cod

  1. Soak the cod tongues and sounds in warm water overnight and scrape them thoroughly.

  2. In the morning, stew them in enough milk and water to cover for 10 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix a little flour with enough butter to create a paste.

  2. Stir the paste into the cooking liquid.

  3. Let the mixture come to a boil.

  4. Pour the boiling mixture over the tongues and sounds.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Cod tongues and sounds
Form the main body of the dish, providing the substance that the sauce is poured over.
Milk
Provides the liquid for stewing and forms the base of the creamy sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce when cooked with butter and heated.
Butter
Combines with flour into a paste and adds richness and fat to the sauce.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture come to a boil after stirring in the flour paste. Flour starch only thickens fully when heated to a boil, so stopping early leaves the sauce thin and possibly tasting raw. Stirring while it heats also prevents lumps from forming.

“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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