Name: Boiled Codfish and Oyster-sauce
Ingredients: 1 dozen oysters; ½ ounce butter; ¼ ounce flour; 1 tablespoon cream; lemon juice to taste; Cayenne pepper to taste; 1 pound codfish; coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Codfish and Oyster-sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash the codfish slice in cold water.
In a small fish kettle, bring water to a boil and add enough salt to make it taste salty.

Cook the cod

Place the codfish on a drainer in the boiling water and let it simmer for 15 minutes without boiling too fast.
Check if the cod is cooked; the flesh should separate from the bones.

Serve

Serve the cod on a folded napkin on a hot dish with oyster sauce.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,184 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).
Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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: Main protein; it firms as it cooks and flakes apart when done.
Oysters: Provide the briny, savoury flavour of the oyster sauce.
Butter: Adds richness and body, carrying flavour and moisture into the sauce.
Flour: Thickens the butter and liquids into a smooth, stable sauce.
Cream: Adds richness and a silky texture to the sauce.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances its fat.

The step that matters

Simmer the cod gently without boiling it hard. Vigorous boiling toughens the proteins and breaks up the delicate flesh. A gentle simmer cooks the fish evenly so it stays moist and flakes cleanly from the bones.

“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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Boiled Codfish and Oyster-sauce