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Codfish on Toast

A simple codfish dish served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Codfish on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the codfish

  1. Soak the shredded codfish in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Bring the codfish to a boil, then drain it through a colander.

Make the sauce

  1. Return the codfish to the skillet with ½ cup cold milk.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons butter and ¼ teaspoon pepper, stirring until smooth.

  3. Mix 1 tablespoon flour with a little cold milk, then add to the skillet and let it boil for a moment.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over buttered toast on a platter.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Shredded codfish
Provides the main flavour and body of the dish.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that carries the fish and thickens into a creamy sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so it coats the toast rather than running off.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture. Flour must be mixed smoothly into cold milk before it goes into the hot skillet, then boiled briefly. Adding it dry or lumpy leaves clumps, and without boiling the starch does not fully thicken the sauce.

“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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