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Codfish Pie — Another Way

A baked codfish pie with butter, flour, water sauce, parsley, mustard, salt, pepper, and grated bread topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Codfish Pie — Another Way

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Flake the cold codfish using two forks.

  2. In a small pan, melt the butter and mix in the flour over heat.

  3. Add the water and stir until it boils and becomes a smooth sauce.

  4. Stir in the chopped parsley, mustard, salt, and pepper.

Assemble and bake

  1. In a pie dish, layer half of the fish, half of the sauce, and a handful of grated bread.

  2. Repeat with the remaining fish, sauce, and bread on top.

  3. Drizzle melted butter over the top and place in the oven to brown or warm through.

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 + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Parsley + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Codfish
Provides the main body and flaky texture of the pie.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth sauce that binds the fish.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the topping brown in the oven.
Bread
Adds bulk and soaks up sauce, giving the layers body and a light crumb.

The step that matters

Making the sauce smooth. Flour must be cooked briefly in the melted butter before the water is added, and the mixture must be stirred while it boils. Stirring keeps starch granules dispersed so the sauce thickens without lumps.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, parsley, pepper, bread):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, parsley, pepper, bread. 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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