Skip to main content
Sauce

Cod Sauce

A creamy sauce made with parsley, chervil, shallots, cloves, bay leaf, mushrooms, butter, flour, and milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chervil and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 266 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cod Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the parsley, chervil, shallots, cloves, bay leaf, and mushrooms.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  3. Add the chopped ingredients and sauté briefly.

  4. Stir in the flour and mix well.

  5. Gradually add milk or cream until the sauce reaches your desired consistency.

  6. Finally, stir in the scalded chopped parsley before serving.

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. Chervil + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together266 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together774 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to form the fat base that carries the aromatics and flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked briefly in the melted butter.
Milk or cream
Adds liquid that loosens the thickened base into a smooth sauce.
Mushrooms
Add savoury, earthy flavour as they sauté with the aromatics.

The step that matters

Adding the milk or cream. Add the liquid gradually so the flour-butter mixture disperses evenly. Adding it all at once can form lumps that are hard to smooth out.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, chervil, shallot, mushroom, butter, flour, milk):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, chervil, shallot, mushroom, butter, flour, milk. 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes