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Salad

Salt Cod Salad

A salad made with soaked salt cod, lettuce, radishes, and cold salad dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Salt Cod Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cod

  1. Soak the salt cod overnight.

  2. Drain the cod and cover it with cold water.

  3. Heat the water slowly, keeping it just below simmering point for 40 minutes.

  4. Drain the cod and let it cool.

Marinate and serve

  1. Break the cod into large flakes and marinate with cold cooked salad dressing.

  2. Let the marinated cod stand on ice for 2 hours.

  3. Arrange the cod on a bed of lettuce.

  4. Add more dressing.

  5. Garnish with small red radishes.

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. Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Salt cod
Provides the main flesh; soaking and gentle heating make it tender and flaky rather than tough.
Cold cooked salad dressing
Adds moisture and richness, coating the flakes and carrying flavour through the salad.

The step that matters

Heat the water slowly, keeping it just below simmering point. Gentle heat below a simmer cooks the cod evenly and keeps the proteins tender. Boiling would toughen the flesh and break it into dry, ragged pieces.

“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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