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To Crimp Cod

A method of preparing cod by salting, soaking, boiling, and serving with hard‑boiled eggs, parsley, parsnips, and egg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 484 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

To Crimp Cod

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the fresh cod into slices or steaks.

  2. Soak the cod in a mixture of salt and water for three hours, adding ½ cup of vinegar.

  3. For dry salted fish, cut into square pieces or soak a large piece in cold water overnight.

Cook the fish

  1. Boil, fry, or broil the cod as desired.

  2. Wash the fish in fresh water and boil it in cold water for 1.5 hours.

  3. Cool the water to handle the fish easily, then remove it from the saucepan.

  4. Pick out the loose bones and scrape the fish clean without removing the skin.

  5. Boil the fish again in boiling water, adding a little salt if it's too fresh, and let it simmer for 1 to 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Garnish with hard‑boiled eggs and parsley, and serve with plain boiled parsnips and egg 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. Parsley + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Vinegar + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Fresh cod
Its flesh is the main protein, firming and flaking as it cooks and soaks.

The step that matters

Simmer the fish gently the second time. Boiling the fish hard breaks its delicate flesh apart and toughens it. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer cooks it through while the pieces stay whole and moist.

Swap the parsnip

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, egg, parsley, butter, sauce. 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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