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To Dress Salt Cod

Salt cod served with a creamy parsnip sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 669 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Dress Salt Cod

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cod

  1. Soak and clean the salt cod, then lay it in water with vinegar overnight.

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

Make the parsnip cream

  1. Boil parsnips until tender, then mash them.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the mashed parsnips with cream and butter mixed with flour, and heat until warmed through.

Serve

  1. Pour the parsnip mixture over the cod and serve.

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. Parsnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 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. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Vinegar + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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
Forms the main protein, which is flaked into the dish after soaking and cooking.
Parsnips
Mashed, they give the sauce body and a natural sweetness.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the parsnip mixture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel in the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cream and butter mixture as it heats, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Heating the parsnip cream. Flour thickens the sauce only when it is heated gently enough to cook and swell its starch. Heating too hard or too fast can leave a raw floury taste or cause the cream to separate.

Swap the parsnip

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

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

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