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Codling Soup

A fish soup made from codling or haddock meat, shrimps, parsley, and egg-based balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Codling Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the forcemeat

  1. Pound the codling meat in a mortar with the shelled shrimps and parsley.

  2. Add the soaked roll crumb and pound the mixture until combined.

  3. Form the mixture into balls using the egg. Season with mace and pepper.

Make the soup

  1. Stew the codlings or haddocks in broth until cooked.

  2. Strain the broth and remove the fish meat.

  3. Pulp the fish through a sieve and boil it with parsley roots.

  4. Thicken the soup and serve it with the forcemeat balls.

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. Meat + shrimptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together584 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Parsley + macetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Milk + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Codlings or haddocks
Provides the fish body that is pounded into the forcemeat and pulped into the soup.
Shelled shrimps
Adds sweet, briny flavour to the pounded forcemeat.
Roll crumb soaked in milk
Soaked bread absorbs moisture and helps bind and soften the forcemeat.
Egg
Binds the forcemeat so it holds together when formed into balls.

The step that matters

Form the mixture into balls using the egg. The egg is the only binder, so the mixture must be well combined and not too wet; otherwise the balls may fall apart or turn out dense and heavy when poached in the soup.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, shrimp, parsley, milk, egg, pepper):

  1. Dillfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, shrimp, parsley, milk, egg, 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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