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Codfish Steak.

A codfish steak seasoned with salt, fried in rendered pork fat, served with lemon and buttered Johnny cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Codfish Steak.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cut the codfish into steaks about 1.5 inches thick and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  2. Let them stand for 2 hours.

Render the pork fat

  1. Dice the salt fat pork and fry it in a pan until all the fat is rendered.

  2. Remove the crispy bits.

Fry and serve

  1. Dredge the codfish steaks in cornmeal.

  2. Fry them in the hot pork fat until dark brown on both sides.

  3. Squeeze lemon juice over the steaks.

  4. Add freshly ground pepper.

  5. Serve with hot, well-buttered Johnny Cake.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

  3. Pork + lemontop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,786 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Codfish
The thick steaks form the main body of the dish, cooking through while the outside browns.
Cornmeal
Coats the steaks so the surface browns and crisps when fried in the hot fat.
Salt fat pork
Its rendered fat is the frying medium, adding savory flavor and helping the coating brown.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fried flavors of the fish and pork fat.

The step that matters

Frying the dredged steaks until dark brown on both sides. The fat must be hot enough to brown the cornmeal coating quickly. If the pan is too cool, the steaks absorb fat and turn greasy and soft instead of crisp.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, 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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