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Cod Steaks

Cod steaks coated in flour, egg, and breadcrumbs, fried until golden and served with anchovy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cod Steaks

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut three nice steaks from the tail end of the cod.

  2. Dip the steaks into flour seasoned with salt and pepper.

  3. Then dip them into the beaten egg.

  4. Coat the steaks well with bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat plenty of frying fat until boiling.

  2. Fry the steaks until they are a nice golden color.

  3. Lift them out and let them drain on a wire rack.

  4. Arrange the steaks on a hot dish and garnish with parsley.

  5. Serve with anchovy sauce.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Cod
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into flakes of tender fish inside the crust.
Egg
Binds the flour and bread crumbs so the coating adheres to the fish.
Bread crumbs
Form the crisp outer layer that browns when fried.
Flour
Gives the egg a dry surface to cling to, helping the crumbs stick evenly.

The step that matters

Fry the steaks until golden. The fat must be hot enough to brown the crumb coating quickly; if it is too cool, the coating absorbs fat and turns greasy before the fish cooks through.

“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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