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Salt Fish with Pork

A dish of salted fish and diced pork cooked together.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,214 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Salt Fish with Pork

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the pork into dice and fry slowly until brown.

  2. If desired, fry the chopped onion with the pork before adding the fish.

  3. Break the cooked salt fish into flakes and add to the pork.

  4. Stir over the fire until very 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.

  1. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  2. Pork + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together668 recipes

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

  3. Fish + oniontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pork
Browns in the pan, adding savoury flavour and substance to the dish.
Salt fish
Provides the main savoury, salty flavour and flaky texture.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, fish):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, fish. 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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