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To Dress Salt Cod or Ling

A sauce made from boiled parsnips, cream, butter, flour, and spices, served over soaked salt cod or ling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and parsnip 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 or Ling

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak the salt cod or ling in water with vinegar overnight.

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

Make the sauce

  1. Beat boiled parsnips in a mortar.

  2. Mix the beaten parsnips with cream, butter, and flour.

  3. Heat the sauce without boiling.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the fish.

  2. Serve with egg sauce instead of parsnip sauce if desired.

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. Flour + parsniptop 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. Pepper + parsniptop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

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 or ling
Main protein that forms the flaked body of the dish.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for flavour and a glossy, rich mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the fish instead of running off.
Boiled parsnips
Provides body and mild sweetness, forming the base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the sauce without boiling. Flour-thickened sauces containing cream can curdle or separate if they boil, and heating gently keeps the sauce smooth and cohesive.

Swap the parsnip

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

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

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