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Stewed Codfish

A simple stew made by soaking codfish, boiling, flaking, and thickening with milk and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Codfish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cod

  1. Cut a piece of codfish to your desired size and soak it overnight.

  2. In the morning, drain the water, add fresh cold water, and bring to a boil.

  3. Turn off the heat and drain the water again.

  4. Mash or flake the fish, removing any bones.

Finish the stew

  1. Add milk and thicken with white flour.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Codfish
Provides the main protein and flaky texture of the stew.
Milk
Adds moisture and a creamy body to the stew.
White flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated.

The step that matters

Soaking and boiling the cod. Soaking draws out excess salt, and draining after boiling removes the water and salt it released. Skipping these steps can leave the fish overly salty and the stew watery.

“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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