Skip to main content
Main

Egg-sauce for a Salt Cod

Egg sauce made from chopped hard‑boiled eggs and melted butter, served over boiled salt cod.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Egg-sauce for a Salt Cod

Ingredients

Directions

Make the egg sauce

  1. Chop the whites of the hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Add the yolks and chop both together, but not too finely.

  3. Heat the melted butter in a pan until it boils.

  4. Stir in the chopped eggs and season with salt.

Cook and serve the cod

  1. Boil the salt cod in a mixture of milk and water until tender and white.

  2. Drain the cod and pour the hot egg sauce over it before serving.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled eggs
Chopped eggs form the body of the sauce, giving it a rich, thick texture.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the flavour of the sauce and coating the cod.
Salt cod
Main fish; boiling it gently makes the flesh tender and turns it white.

The step that matters

Boiling the butter until it just boils. Butter that is overheated can brown or separate, which spoils the smooth, creamy character of the sauce.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes