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Salt Fish in Cream

A salted fish dish cooked slowly with milk, butter, flour, and seasonings.

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 ↓

Salt Fish in Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cover the salt fish with cold water and let it soak overnight.

  2. In the morning, pour off the water and add the milk to the fish.

Make the dish

  1. Heat the mixture slowly, keeping it at the boiling point without allowing it to boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Rub the butter and flour together and stir the mixture into the fish and milk in the saucepan.

  3. Cook for 10 minutes.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

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. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 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. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  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

Salt fish
Is the main protein, softened by soaking so it becomes tender and less salty.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the fish cooks in.
Butter and flour
Rubbed together and stirred in, flour thickens the milk into a creamy sauce while butter adds richness.

The step that matters

Keeping the milk just below boiling. Milk scorches and can curdle or form a skin if it boils hard, so heating it slowly at a gentle simmer keeps the sauce smooth.

“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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