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Boiled Codfish

A boiled codfish dish seasoned with pepper, sea salt, and enriched with eggs, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Boiled Codfish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak the codfish in cold water overnight to freshen it.

  2. An hour before dinner, drain the water and break the fish into pieces.

  3. Place the fish in a pan with enough cold water to cover it and heat slowly until it scalds, but do not let it boil.

  4. Pour off the water and add enough milk to cover the fish, then bring it to a boil.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix 1 tablespoon of flour with cold milk until smooth, then add to the boiling mixture to thicken.

  2. Just before serving, add 2-3 eggs and a piece of butter the size of a small hen's egg.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

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).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Codfish
Forms the main body of the dish; soaking first draws out salt so the flesh is milder.
Milk
Cooks the fish gently in a creamy liquid that becomes the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, coating sauce.
Eggs
Set gently with the heat to enrich and thicken the sauce slightly.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Bringing the milk to a boil after adding flour. Flour needs to be whisked smooth into cold milk before it meets the heat, otherwise it clumps. Once boiling, it thickens as starch swells, so the sauce should be stirred to keep it even.

“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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