Name: Broiled Codfish or Haddock
Ingredients: 1 fish (cod or haddock); Maitre d'Hôtel Butter (see separate recipe)

Why it works: Fish and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,488 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Broiled Codfish or Haddock

Ingredients

1 fish (cod or haddock)
Maitre d'Hôtel Butter (see separate recipe)

Directions

Prepare and broil

Split the tail-end of the fish.
Broil the fish as directed for Broiled Fish.

Finish and serve

Spread with Maitre d'Hôtel Butter.
Let it stand in the open oven for 1 to 2 minutes to melt the butter.
Serve hot.

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.

Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,488 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

Fish (cod or haddock): Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to a flaky, tender texture under the broiler.
Maitre d'hôtel butter: Melts over the hot fish, adding richness, moisture and savoury flavour.

“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.