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Creamed Codfish

A codfish dish simmered in milk and cream with a butter‑flour roux, served with mashed potatoes.

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 ↓

Creamed Codfish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash the codfish well and soak it in hot water for 30 minutes.

  2. Drain the fish and place it in a frying pan with the milk and cream.

Make the sauce

  1. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix the butter with the flour and a little cold milk to form a paste.

  3. Stir the paste into the fish mixture and let it simmer slowly for a few minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with mashed potatoes.

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. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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 main flesh and flavour of the dish once soaked and flaked.
Heavy cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the sauce.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the milk and cream into a sauce when cooked with the butter.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour and helps form the flour paste that thickens the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste into the hot mixture. Flour lumps if added unevenly. Mixing it into a smooth paste first lets it disperse, and gentle simmering lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce evenly.

“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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