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Codfish Steak

Codfish steak seasoned with salt, cornmeal, and pork fat, fried and served with lemon and Johnny cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Codfish Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cut the codfish into steaks about 1½ inches thick.

  2. Sprinkle a little coarse sea salt over the steaks and let them stand for 2 hours.

Render the pork

  1. Dice the salt fat pork.

  2. Fry the diced pork until all the fat is rendered, then remove the crisp bits.

Fry and serve

  1. Dredge the codfish steaks in cornmeal.

  2. Heat the pork fat until smoking hot and fry the steaks until dark brown on both sides.

  3. Squeeze a little lemon juice over the steaks, add a dash of freshly ground pepper, and serve with hot, well-buttered Johnny cake.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

  3. Pork + lemontop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,786 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

Codfish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked to a firm, flaky texture.
Salt fat pork
Its rendered fat is the frying medium that gives the steaks flavour and browning.
Cornmeal
Forms a coating that crisps and browns in the hot pork fat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fried fish.

The step that matters

Heating the pork fat until smoking hot before frying. If the fat is not hot enough, the cornmeal coating absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisping. A properly hot fat sears the coating quickly, browning the outside while keeping the fish inside moist.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper. 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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