Skip to main content
Main

Fried Cod’s Roe

Fried cod roe coated in egg and breadcrumbs, pan‑fried and served with optional butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sauce and anchovy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,057 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fried Cod’s Roe

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the roe

  1. Boil the soft roe in boiling water with vinegar, salt, and pepper for 10 minutes.

  2. Remove the roe and let it drain on a strainer.

Coat and fry

  1. Beat the egg.

  2. Dip the roe in half of the beaten egg to coat.

  3. Mix raspings and breadcrumbs.

  4. Coat the roe in the mixture.

  5. Fry the coated roe in boiling fat until brown on both sides.

Serve

  1. Serve with butter sauce flavored with anchovy essence or plain butter sauce seasoned with lemon juice and cayenne pepper.

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. Sauce + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Roe + anchovytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together65 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Roe + saucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together142 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Egg + anchovytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Soft roe
Forms the main body of the dish; its mild, creamy flesh sets firm when cooked.
Egg
Acts as a binder so the crumb coating adheres to the roe while frying.
Raspings and breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust when fried in hot fat.

The step that matters

Frying the coated roe. The fat must be boiling hot so the crumb crust browns quickly and seals before the roe overcooks and breaks apart or absorbs grease.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes