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Codfish Cakes

A fried dish of mashed potatoes mixed with finely chopped salt codfish, butter, milk, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Codfish Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the codfish

  1. Soak the salt codfish in cold water until it comes to a boil, then pour off the water.

  2. If the fish is too salty, add fresh cold water without boiling it.

  3. Once soaked, remove all bones and skin, and chop the fish finely.

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes until done, then drain and mash them very fine.

  2. Add the milk, butter, and coarse sea salt to the mashed potatoes, and mix well.

Form and fry

  1. Combine the potato mixture with the chopped fish, using more potatoes than fish.

  2. Roll the mixture into small round cakes about 1 inch thick.

  3. Fry the cakes in hot oil until they are a rich brown.

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. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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 savory flavor and the flaky body of the cakes.
Potatoes
Bind the fish together and give the cakes a soft, tender interior.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the mashed potato mixture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, making the mashed potato smoother.

The step that matters

Desalting the codfish. Salt codfish is cured very salty, so soaking it in fresh water draws out excess salt. Soaking too briefly leaves the cakes overly salty, while the proportion of potato to fish also tempers saltiness.

“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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