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Codfish Cakes and Poached Eggs

Codfish cakes topped with poached eggs, bacon curls, parsley, and radish garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Codfish Cakes and Poached Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the fish cakes

  1. Cream butter with salt, pepper, parsley, and lemon juice until smooth.

  2. Mix in codfish until thoroughly combined, then shape into flat cakes.

Cook bacon and fish cakes

  1. Cook bacon slices in a hot frying pan, turning them in a spiral fashion until crispy.

  2. Remove bacon and drain on paper towels.

  3. Sauté fish cakes in the bacon fat until golden on both sides.

Assemble and garnish

  1. Top each fish cake with a well-poached egg.

  2. Add curls of bacon to each fish cake.

  3. Garnish with parsley and radish.

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. Parsley + radishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together120 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + radishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Codfish
Forms the main body of the cakes, providing the flaky texture once shaped and cooked.
Butter
Enriches the mixture and adds fat that helps the cakes brown in the pan.
Bacon
Its fat is used to fry the cakes, adding smoky flavour and savoury richness.
Eggs (in the method)
Topping that adds richness, and the yolk moistens the fish cakes when broken.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and fish flavours.

The step that matters

Sautéing the fish cakes in bacon fat. Cakes that are too wet or cooked over low heat will stick and steam rather than brown. Pat them dry and cook over steady heat until golden on both sides, which builds flavour through browning.

Swap the radish

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, lemon. 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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