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Cods' Tongues with Egg Sauce

Cod tongues simmered with milk and pepper, served in a butter‑flour sauce with chopped hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Cods' Tongues with Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cod tongues

  1. Soak the cod tongues in water for 2 hours or longer.

  2. Place the soaked tongues in a pot, cover with cold water, and add the milk and red pepper pod or cayenne.

  3. Cook slowly for about 30 minutes until tender.

Make the egg sauce

  1. In a separate saucepan, melt the butter and stir in the flour until bubbling.

  2. Gradually add the milk and cooking water from the tongues to create a sauce, adjusting for salt and thickness.

  3. Add the cooked tongues and chopped eggs to the sauce and serve hot.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 tongues
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming tender and flaky when slowly cooked.
Milk
Adds creaminess and richness to the sauce and the cooking liquid.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and a soft, rich texture to the sauce.
Butter
Provides fat for the roux and a rich, savory flavor to the sauce.
Flour
Forms a roux with the butter that thickens the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce. Flour must cook in the melted butter until bubbling so it loses its raw taste and thickens smoothly. Adding the liquid gradually keeps the sauce free of 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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