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Boiled Cod with Egg Sauce

A boiled cod served with a thickened egg sauce and butter, garnished with hard boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,488 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Cod with Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Salt the cod fish well.

  2. Tie the fish in a linen bag.

  3. Put the bag in boiling water.

  4. Cook for one hour.

Make the egg sauce

  1. Beat the egg, then mix in the corn starch.

  2. Slowly add boiling water to the egg mixture until it thickens.

  3. Combine the thickened egg sauce with the cooked fish.

  4. Add a piece of butter to the sauce.

  5. Pour the sauce over the fish.

Serve

  1. Garnish with hard boiled eggs.

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. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  2. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Fish + corntop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together70 recipes

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

  5. Fish + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,782 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

Cod fish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in boiling water until done.
Egg
Thickens the sauce as it sets with the hot water, giving it a creamy body.
Corn starch
Stabilises the egg sauce so it thickens smoothly and holds its shape when poured.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy finish to the sauce.

The step that matters

Slowly add boiling water to the egg mixture. Adding the hot water gradually lets the beaten egg warm evenly, so it thickens smoothly. Pouring it in all at once can scramble the egg and leave lumps.

“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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