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Sauce for Boiled Cod

A creamy sauce made with boiling water, milk, butter, flour, eggs, lemon, pepper, salt, and parsley for boiled cod.

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 ↓

Sauce for Boiled Cod

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a pot, combine boiling water and milk.

  2. Gradually stir in butter and flour mixed with cold water.

  3. As the sauce thickens, add the chopped yolk of the boiled egg and the beaten raw egg.

  4. Remove from heat and season with pepper, salt, parsley, and lemon juice.

  5. Cover and let sit in boiling water (not over heat) for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Serve

  1. Pour some sauce over the fish and serve the rest in a separate dish.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Thicken the sauce as they set with gentle heat, giving it body and richness.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich mouthfeel and carries flavour.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the sauce and adds mild sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding the raw egg while the sauce thickens. Egg proteins set when heated, so the beaten raw egg can scramble or curdle if the sauce is too hot. Adding it gradually, off direct heat, keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Cardamomfits about as well
  4. Cinnamonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, egg, pepper, 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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