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Creamed Codfish

A creamy codfish dish with eggs, milk, butter, flour, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Make the cream sauce

  1. Place codfish and milk in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Blend butter and flour.

  3. Add the mixture to the saucepan, allowing it to boil for 2 to 3 minutes.

  4. Add cayenne and white pepper.

  5. Remove from heat.

Finish and serve

  1. Dice the hard cooked eggs or rice them.

  2. Add the eggs to the mixture.

  3. Serve the creamed mixture on buttered toast.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 flavour and body of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth cream sauce when cooked with butter.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour in the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that becomes the creamy sauce.
Eggs
Add richness and body to the sauce and give the dish its texture.

The step that matters

Boil the flour mixture for 2 to 3 minutes. Flour thickens only when its starch granules are heated to boiling in the liquid. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and tasting of raw flour, so the mixture should be kept at a full boil for the stated time while stirred.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, pepper, butter, flour):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, pepper, butter, flour. 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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