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Codfish Gruel

A simple codfish gruel made with shredded codfish, flour, boiling water, butter, and served with toasted crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Codfish Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gruel

  1. Freshen the shredded codfish to taste.

  2. Add the flour to the codfish.

  3. Pour in the boiling water and allow to simmer until the flour is thoroughly cooked.

  4. Stir in a small amount of butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with toasted crackers.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Shredded codfish
Provides the main savory flavor and the substance of the gruel.
Flour
Thickens the boiling water into a gruel as its starch cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel at the end.

The step that matters

Simmering the flour until thoroughly cooked. Raw flour tastes pasty and floury. Simmering in the boiling water gelatinizes the starch, which thickens the gruel and removes the raw taste, so it should cook fully before serving.

“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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