Skip to main content
Main

Baked Codfish

A baked codfish dish with potatoes, butter, milk, flour, and hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Baked Codfish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the mixture

  1. Soak, boil, and pick the salt fish as for fish balls.

  2. Add an equal quantity of mashed or chopped potatoes, butter, and enough warm milk to make it soft.

Bake

  1. Transfer the mixture to a buttered dish, rub butter over the top, and sprinkle with sifted flour.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 30 minutes until rich brown.

Serve with sauce

  1. Make a sauce with drawn butter and sliced hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Serve in a gravy boat.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

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

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

Salt fish
Provides the main savory, salty flavour and the flaked body of the dish.
Potatoes
Bulks out the fish and gives the mixture a soft, creamy texture.
Butter
Adds richness, and its milk solids help the top brown in the oven.
Milk
Adds moisture so the mixture becomes soft and spreadable.
Flour
Sprinkled on top, it helps form a browned, crisp crust while baking.
Hard-boiled eggs
Sliced into the butter sauce to add texture and mild richness.

The step that matters

Baking until rich brown. Browning comes from heat acting on the flour, butter and milk proteins at the surface. Pulling the dish out early leaves the top pale and the centre wet and loose, so it should bake until the top is well coloured.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, milk, flour, egg):

  1. Potatothe original
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, milk, flour, egg. 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipes