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Stewed Codfish

A simple codfish stew made with butter, milk, flour, pepper, and garnished with hard‑boiled 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 ↓

Stewed Codfish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the codfish

  1. Shred the codfish finely and rinse it in cold water.

  2. Bring the water to a boil, then drain it off.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Add a good piece of butter, milk, and flour to create a thick mixture.

  2. Scald the mixture just long enough to cook the flour.

  3. Serve on a platter with bits of butter, a little pepper, and garnish with thinly sliced hard-boiled eggs.

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. Butter + flourtop 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).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Codfish
Forms the main body of the dish, flaking into the thick mixture.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished dish.
Milk
Provides the creamy liquid that forms the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture as it heats, giving the dish its body.

The step that matters

Scald the mixture just long enough to cook the flour. Flour thickens once heated in liquid, but it tastes raw and pasty until fully cooked. Prolonged heating can scorch the milk on the bottom of the pan, so timing matters.

“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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