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Cod a LA Creme

A cod dish simmered in a buttery sauce with shallot, parsley, stock, milk, and spices, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Cod a LA Creme

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove the skin from the cod and break it into flakes while hot.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the butter, shallot, parsley, and stock; bring to a boil for 5 minutes.

  2. Stir in enough flour to thicken the mixture, then add the milk or cream.

  3. Simmer for 10 minutes, then add cayenne pepper and powdered sugar, along with lemon juice if desired.

  4. Gently add the fish to the sauce to warm it through without boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve in a dish garnished with croutons.

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. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 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

Cod
Forms the main body of the dish, providing flakes that hold their shape in the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and gives the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a sauce by starch swelling when heated.
Milk or cream
Supplies liquid and fat that give the sauce its body and creamy texture.
White stock
Provides the savoury liquid base that the sauce is built on.

The step that matters

Gently add the fish to the sauce. Boiling the sauce once the flaked fish is added toughens the protein and breaks the flakes apart. Keeping it just warm preserves a tender texture and an intact appearance.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Shallotthe original
  2. Arrowrootfits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Capsicumfits about as well

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