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Codfish Balls

Codfish balls are made from shredded salt cod mixed with mashed potato, coated in flour, and fried.

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 codfish

  1. Remove bones and skin from the codfish and place in an earthen dish. Pour boiling water over the codfish and keep warm for 2 hours without boiling.

  2. Drain the water and shred the codfish into tiny bits or chop it. Mix the codfish with hot mashed potato.

Make the butter mixture

  1. In a separate pan, mix flour with butter, add boiling water and pepper, and cook for a few minutes. Combine the butter mixture with the codfish and potato mixture.

Form and fry

  1. Form into 8 flat cakes, dredge with flour, and fry in salt-pork drippings until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve on a platter with fried salt pork and garnish with parsley. Optionally, add a border of 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 savoury flavour and the flaked body of the cakes.
Mashed potato
Adds starch and softness, binding the fish and keeping the cakes moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and helping the cakes brown.
Flour
Thickens the butter mixture and gives the outside of the cakes a golden crust.

The step that matters

Keeping the codfish warm without boiling. Boiling toughens the fish proteins and makes them dry and stringy, so the codfish should soak in hot water that stays below a boil.

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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