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To Dress a Cod's Head

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,145 recipes mention both. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat, shellfish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

  1. Pour the liquid from the dish into a saucepan and boil for 3-4 minutes.

  2. Add red wine, coarse sea salt, shrimp, oysters, mushroom pickle, and butter.

  3. Stir well and let it boil until thick.

  4. Strain the mixture and pour it back into the dish.

  5. Arrange toasted bread around the dish and garnish with crispy parsley, notched lemon, and scraped horseradish.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Butter + breadtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,145 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together12,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Red wine + mushroomtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together720 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Shrimp + oystertop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Mushroom + breadtop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,535 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (red wine, shrimp, oyster, mushroom, butter, flour, bread):

  1. Thymebetter flavor fit
  2. Garlicbetter flavor fit
  3. Celeryabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red wine, shrimp, oyster, mushroom, butter, flour, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

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