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Salt Fish, Ob Dun Fish

Salted fish prepared by scalding, boiling, and serving with drawn butter and pork scraps.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and pork work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 668 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Salt Fish, Ob Dun Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Soak and clean

  1. Place the whole fish in a fish kettle with 6-8 quarts of water overnight.

  2. Wash the fish and the kettle thoroughly the next morning.

  3. Return the fish to the kettle. Add fresh water.

  4. Heat near the fire to scald, but do not boil.

  5. Transfer the fish to a pan of cold water. Wash off the skin and fins.

  6. Wash the kettle again. Place the fish back in. Add fresh water.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Cut the fat salt pork into small squares. Fry the squares in a pan until light brown.

  3. Cut the fish into 8-inch square pieces.

  4. Serve the fish on a clean napkin on a fish dish with drawn butter and pork scraps.

  5. Garnish with sliced hard-boiled eggs and boiled beets.

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. Fish + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together668 recipes

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

  2. Fish + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,782 recipes

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

  3. Pork + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,387 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Is the main dish, cooked gently in water so it stays moist and flakes easily.
Fat salt pork
Fried until light brown, it renders fat and adds savory, crisp pork flavor as a topping.

The step that matters

Heat near the fire to scald, but do not boil. Water held just below boiling heats the fish gently. Boiling toughens and breaks up the delicate flesh, so the fish can turn firm and ragged instead of tender.

“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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