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Codfish in Cream

A creamy codfish dish cooked with milk, butter, flour, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Codfish in Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the codfish in boiling water and let it stand on the back of the stove.

  2. In a saucepan, heat 1 pint of milk.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a separate bowl, mix ½ cup of cold milk with 1 beaten egg.

  2. Stir 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon of flour into the hot milk.

  3. Once the milk boils, add the drained codfish and cook slowly for 5 minutes.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 flaky, salty fish that forms the main body of the dish.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the creamy sauce.
Flour
Starch thickens the hot milk into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the hot milk. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unmixed. Blending it well with the butter lets the starch disperse evenly, so it thickens the milk smoothly instead of forming lumps.

“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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