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Boiled Codfish

A codfish boiled and served with a butter‑flour‑egg sauce seasoned with salt, parsley, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Codfish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cod

  1. Soak the codfish in lukewarm water early in the evening.

  2. Change the water to warm before bed and cover closely.

  3. In the morning, change the water again.

  4. Two hours before dinner, remove the fish and plunge it into very cold water to firm it up.

  5. Place the fish in a pot with enough lukewarm water to cover it and boil for 30 minutes.

  6. Drain the fish well and lay it in a hot dish.

Make the egg sauce

  1. For the egg sauce, combine ½ cup milk and ½ cup boiling water in a saucepan.

  2. When scalding hot, stir in 2 tablespoons of butter and 1 tablespoon of flour mixed with cold water.

  3. As the sauce thickens, add the yolks of 2 hard‑boiled eggs, rubbed to a paste with butter.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and chopped parsley, then let it boil briefly.

  5. Finish by adding 1 tablespoon of vinegar steeped with celery salt.

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. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 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

Codfish
Forms the main body of the dish; soaking and firming it shape its texture before cooking.
Flour
Thickens the milk and water mixture into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Butter
Adds richness and smoothness to the sauce and helps blend the egg yolks.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks are mashed into the sauce, adding body and a rich, creamy flavor.

The step that matters

Add the flour and butter to scalding liquid. Flour must be mixed smoothly with cold water first and added to hot liquid while stirring, otherwise it clumps instead of thickening the sauce evenly.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

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