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Salt Cod

Salt Cod is boiled salt cod served with a butter‑flour sauce, lemon, parsley, and fried potato garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Salt Cod

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak the salt cod in cold water to remove excess salt.

  2. Place the fish in a large pot of cold water and bring to a boil.

  3. Once boiling, remove from heat and cover to keep warm.

  4. Taste the fish.

  5. Remove the skin and bones from the fish.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt the butter.

  2. Add flour, water, and a little salt to the melted butter, stirring until combined.

  3. Heat the sauce gently without boiling until it thickens, stirring well.

  4. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper if needed.

  5. Mix a pinch of chopped parsley with a little glaze and lemon juice.

  6. Taste the sauce.

  7. If the sauce is too brown, add a little thick cream to lighten it.

Serve

  1. Gently mix the fish into the sauce.

  2. Serve in a deep dish or a vol au vent.

  3. Garnish with fried 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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

Salt cod
Forms the main flesh of the dish, flaking into the sauce as its body.
Butter
Provides richness and fat, carrying flavour through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and water into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter sauce and balances the salted fish.
Thick cream
Lightens the colour and adds smoothness to an overly browned sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the sauce gently without boiling. Flour thickens as its starch swells with heat, but boiling can cause the butter emulsion to separate and the sauce to turn grainy or brown.

“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.

More salt cod recipes

Stewed 11with Egg Sauce 10Boiled 9Egg Sauce for 7Chowder 7Creamed 6 See all 24 →

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