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Baking Fish, Cod's Head

A baked cod head served with a sauce of wine, ketchup, shrimp, oysters, and mushroom pickle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 23 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Baking Fish, Cod's Head

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare and bake

  1. Clean and wash the cod's head thoroughly.

  2. Rub a baking dish with butter and place the cod's head inside.

  3. Add sweet herbs, onion with cloves, mace, pepper, bruised nutmeg, lemon peel, horseradish, and water.

  4. Dust the cod's head with flour and grate nutmeg over it.

  5. Dot with pieces of butter and sprinkle with breadcrumbs.

  6. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until done.

Make the sauce

  1. Remove the cod's head and place it in a serving dish over boiling water to keep warm.

  2. Pour the baking liquid into a saucepan and boil for 3-4 minutes.

  3. Strain the liquid and add red wine, ketchup, shrimp, oysters, mushroom pickle, and flour-rolled butter.

  4. Stir and boil until thick, then strain again and pour over the cod's head.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with toasted bread, 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cod's head
Forms the main body of the dish and gives the sauce its fish flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the crust brown and the sauce taste rounded.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce when it is rolled into butter and boiled.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth to the sauce.
Oysters
Contribute briny, savoury flavour and tenderness to the sauce.
Shrimp
Add sweet, briny seafood flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the sauce until thick. Flour-rolled butter thickens only when it is boiled, so the sauce must be stirred and fully boiled to thicken. Boiling too briefly leaves it thin, while overheating can make it lumpy or stick to the pan.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, clove, mace, nutmeg, lemon, horseradish):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, clove, mace, nutmeg, lemon, horseradish. 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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