Why it works: Fish and oyster work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 496 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓
To Boil Cod
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Wash and clean the cod, rubbing the inside with coarse sea salt.
Boil and serve
Place the fish in a kettle and cover it completely with water.
Boil small fish for 15 minutes and large fish for 30 minutes.
To prevent overcooking, slice the tail and fry it separately.
Garnish the head and shoulders with the roe on one side and the liver on the other.
Serve with oyster sauce or plain melted butter.
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.
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Fish + oystertop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together496 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Cod
- Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into firm, flaky flesh.
The step that matters
Boiling time by fish size. Boiling for too long toughens and dries the flesh as proteins over-tighten, while too short leaves the centre undercooked. Matching the time to the fish's size keeps the flesh moist and fully cooked.
“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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