Name: Cod’s Sounds, and Egg Sauce
Ingredients: cod's sounds; milk; water; egg sauce; boiled parsnips

Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and 88,785 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cod’s Sounds, and Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the cod's sounds in milk and water for at least 6 hours.
Wash the sounds and boil them in a stewpan with fresh milk and water for about 1 hour.
Drain the sounds on a napkin and cut them into 1.5-inch square pieces.
In a stewpan, combine the sounds with a sufficient quantity of egg sauce and toss over the fire.
Pile the mixture on a dish in a pyramidal form and garnish with neatly-cut boiled parsnips.

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.

Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together88,785 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Milk + parsniptop 19% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together322 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).
Sauce + parsniptop 23% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together156 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Milk + saucetop 29% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together3,759 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Egg + parsniptop 33% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together442 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the parsnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, sauce):

Capsicumbetter flavor fit
Asparagusbetter flavor fit
Potatobetter flavor fit
Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sauce. 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).