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Boiled Fresh Cod

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and sauce work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 775 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiled Fresh Cod

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the fish in a fish kettle or tie it in cloth.

  2. Add boiling water, salt, and scraped horseradish.

  3. Let it simmer until cooked through.

  4. Place a folded napkin on a dish.

  5. Turn the fish onto the napkin and serve with drawn butter, oyster sauce, or egg sauce.

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. Horseradish + saucetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together775 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Horseradish + oystertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together282 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Oyster + saucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Cucumberfits about as well
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, oyster, sauce, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

More boiled cod recipes

Head and Shoulders 18Fish 9Head 5with Oyster Sauce 4With Egg Sauce 3Sauce for 3 See all 89 →

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