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Stewed Salt Cod

A stew of soaked salt cod cooked with butter, flour, milk, pepper, topped with sliced hard-boiled eggs and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Stewed Salt Cod

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cod

  1. Scald the soaked cod by boiling it in water for 10 minutes.

  2. Scrape the cod to remove skin, then flake it into pieces.

Stew and serve

  1. In a stew-pan, combine the flaked cod with butter mixed with flour and enough milk to moisten.

  2. Let it stew gently for 10 minutes.

  3. Add pepper to taste and serve hot.

  4. Transfer to a deep dish, top with sliced hard-boiled eggs, and garnish with parsley.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 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

Soaked cod
Provides the main body and flaky texture of the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk so the stew becomes creamy rather than watery.
Milk
Moistens the fish and forms a creamy base for the stew.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy contrast to the flaky cod.

The step that matters

Stewing gently after adding the milk. Flour thickens the milk only when it heats gently; boiling hard can scorch the milk and cause the mixture to break or turn grainy.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Cardamomfits about as well

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