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Boiled Salt Codfish

A boiled salt codfish served with a buttered egg yolk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Boiled Salt Codfish

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the codfish

  1. Soak the salt codfish in lukewarm water overnight, starting as early as 8 PM.

  2. Change the water to warm water before bed and cover closely.

  3. In the morning, change the water again and wash off the salt.

  4. Two hours before dinner, plunge the fish into very cold water to firm it up.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the fish in a pot with enough lukewarm water to cover it and boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Drain the fish well and place it on a hot dish.

  3. Prepare the egg sauce by rubbing the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs with butter until smooth, and pour it over the fish.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Salt codfish
Main protein; soaking removes salt so the flesh becomes mild and tender when cooked.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks are mashed with butter to form a smooth, rich sauce that adds fat and body.
Butter
Fat that makes the egg yolk sauce smooth and rich in texture.

The step that matters

Soaking the salt codfish. Salt codfish must be soaked long enough and the water changed so excess salt draws out of the flesh. Too little soaking leaves the fish overly salty and tough, while the cold plunge helps firm the flesh before cooking.

“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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