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To Dress Salt Cod

A salt cod dish dressed with a parsnip, cream, butter, and flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 669 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Dress Salt Cod

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cod

  1. Soak and clean the salt cod, then lay it in water with vinegar overnight.

Cook and make the sauce

  1. Boil the cod until tender, then break it into flakes on a serving dish.

  2. Boil the parsnips, then beat them in a mortar.

  3. Combine the parsnips with cream and butter mixed with flour.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the cod.

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. Parsnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Vinegar + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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 cod
Forms the main body of the dish, flaking into tender pieces when cooked.
Parsnips
Provide the bulk and natural sweetness of the creamy sauce when beaten smooth.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the parsnip sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and with flour helps thicken the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream sauce so it clings to the cod.

The step that matters

Soaking the salt cod overnight. Salt cod is heavily salted, and soaking it in water with vinegar draws out salt so the fish is not overly salty. Skipping or shortening the soak leaves the dish too salty.

Swap the parsnip

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, cream, butter, flour. 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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