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Salt Cod Salad

A salad made from soaked and cooked salt cod served over lettuce with dressing and radishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Salt Cod Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Soak and poach

  1. Soak the cod overnight.

  2. Drain the cod.

  3. Cover the cod with cold water.

  4. Heat slowly, keeping just below the simmering point for 40 minutes.

  5. Drain the cod.

Cool and marinate

  1. Cool the cod.

  2. Break the cod into large flakes.

  3. Marinate the cod with salad dressing.

  4. Let the cod stand on ice for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Arrange the cod on a bed of lettuce.

  2. Add more dressing.

  3. Garnish with radishes.

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. Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cod
Provides the firm, flaky protein that forms the body of the salad.
Salad dressing
Adds moisture and flavour, soaking into the flaked fish during marinating.

The step that matters

Heat slowly below the simmering point. Gentle heat cooks the cod through without boiling it. Vigorous heat toughens the proteins and dries and breaks up the flesh, so the flakes come out tough rather than 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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