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Fish Recipes

A fried fish cake made from mashed boiled potatoes, codfish, flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fish Recipes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mash the boiled potatoes with butter in a large bowl.

  2. Add the codfish and mix well.

  3. Flour your hands and shape the mixture into balls.

  4. Flatten the balls into cakes.

Cook

  1. Fry the cakes in butter until golden 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 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

Boiled potatoes
Provide the starchy bulk that holds the cakes together and gives them a soft, tender texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the cakes brown when fried.
Codfish
Supplies the main flavour and protein of the cakes.
Flour
Coats the hands and outside of the cakes so the mixture does not stick and browns well.

The step that matters

Fry the cakes in butter until golden brown. Frying over steady heat browns the outside through Maillard reactions while the inside warms through. Too high heat burns the butter and surface before the centre heats, and too low heat leaves the cakes greasy and pale.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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.

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