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To Dress Salt Cod or Ling

A sauce of cream, butter, flour, white pepper, mustard, and optional cayenne served over flaked salt cod or ling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and mustard are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Dress Salt Cod or Ling

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak and clean the salt cod or ling overnight in water with vinegar.

  2. Boil the fish until cooked, then break it into flakes on a serving dish.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the parsneps, then beat them in a mortar.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the beaten parsneps with cream, butter rolled in flour, white pepper, and mustard; boil together.

  3. Pour the sauce over the fish and serve hot.

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. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 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. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + white peppertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,154 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

Salt cod or ling
Forms the main body of the dish as flaked fish after soaking and cooking.
Parsneps
Boiled and beaten to a soft pulp that thickens and gives body to the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and with flour helps thicken the sauce.
Flour
Rolled into the butter to help thicken the sauce as it boils.

The step that matters

Boiling the sauce after adding the butter and flour. Flour needs to be heated with fat and liquid for long enough to cook out its raw taste and thicken properly. Stopping early can leave the sauce thin or floury.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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