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Boiled Cod with Caper Sauce

A boiled cod fillet topped with a butter, flour, egg yolk, lemon, and caper sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,222 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Cod with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Sew the fish up neatly in a thin cloth.

  2. Cook the fish in boiling water for 15 minutes per pound.

Make the caper sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine ½ cup boiling water and 2 tablespoons butter.

  2. Stir in 1 heaping teaspoon flour until thick.

  3. Beat in the whipped egg yolk, lemon juice, and capers.

  4. Cook for half a minute.

  5. Remove from heat and pour over the fish.

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. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Fish + caperstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

Cod
Is the main protein, cooked gently in boiling water until it turns flaky and firm.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and water.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce, giving it a creamy body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.
Capers
Add salty, sharp flavour that cuts through the richness of the butter and yolk.

The step that matters

Beat in the whipped egg yolk. Egg yolk can curdle or scramble if the sauce is too hot. Remove the pan from heat before adding it and keep stirring so the yolk thickens the sauce smoothly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, flour, egg, capers):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, flour, egg, capers. 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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