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Codfish Balls

Codfish balls are fried cakes made from salt cod, mashed potato, butter, flour, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Codfish Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove bones and skin from the salt codfish and place it in an earthen dish.

  2. Pour 3 cups of boiling water over the codfish and keep warm on the stove for 2 hours without boiling.

  3. Drain the water, then pick the fish into tiny bits or chop it.

Make the mixture

  1. Add 1 heaping cup of hot mashed potato to the codfish.

  2. In a saucepan, mix 1 teaspoon of flour with 1 heaping tablespoon of butter, then add 3 tablespoons of boiling water and a dust of pepper, and cook for a few minutes.

  3. Combine the butter mixture with the codfish and potato, then form into 8 flat cakes.

Fry and serve

  1. Dredge the cakes with flour and fry in salt-pork drippings until golden brown.

  2. Serve on a platter with fried salt pork and garnish with parsley. Optionally, add hot 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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Potato + porktop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Salt codfish
Provides the main flavour and the flaky body of the cakes.
Mashed potato
Adds bulk and moisture and helps the mixture bind into cakes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the mixture.
Flour
Thickens the butter mixture and forms a golden crust when dredged and fried.

The step that matters

Soaking the salt codfish. Salt codfish is very salty and must be soaked in warm water without boiling. Boiling toughens the fish and leaves it overly salty, while too short a soak leaves the cakes unpleasantly salty.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, pepper, pork, parsley, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, pepper, pork, parsley, 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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