Skip to main content
Main

Codfish on Toast

A toast topped with a codfish mixture cooked with milk, eggs, flour, butter, pepper, and dry mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the codfish

  1. Soak the shredded codfish in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Bring the codfish to a boil, then drain it through a colander.

  3. Return the codfish to the skillet with ½ cup cold milk.

  4. Season with butter and pepper.

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the eggs well.

  2. Stir the flour with a little cold milk until smooth.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the codfish and let it boil for a moment.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over buttered toast on a platter.

  2. Add a generous dash of dry mustard before cooking or mix it with the flour and milk.

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. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Provides the main savory flavour and the flaky body of the dish.
Eggs
Thicken and enrich the mixture as they set with heat.
Flour
Thickens the milk and codfish into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Milk
Adds moisture and creaminess, loosening the flour into a sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the dish.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into cold milk until smooth. Flour added directly to hot liquid forms lumps, because its starch granules clump before they can disperse. Mixing it first with cold milk lets the starch spread evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly when it boils.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, pepper, egg, flour. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes