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Baked Fresh Codfish with Cheese Sauce

A baked codfish topped with a cheese sauce made from veal stock, Parmesan, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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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 ↓

Baked Fresh Codfish with Cheese Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak the codfish in a mixture of salt and water for 30 minutes.

  2. Wipe the fish dry.

  3. Rub the fish with melted butter and lemon juice.

  4. Add veal stock or weak gravy to a baking pan, ensuring it does not touch the fish.

  5. Season the fish with salt and pepper.

  6. Cover the fish.

  7. Bake the fish for 10 minutes per pound.

  8. Remove the fish from the pan.

Topping and browning

  1. Sprinkle dry bread crumbs thickly over the fish.

  2. Add dots of butter to the bread crumbs.

  3. Bake the fish uncovered until browned.

Make the cheese sauce and serve

  1. Strain the gravy from the pan.

  2. Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in browned flour.

  3. Add lemon juice to the gravy.

  4. Add Parmesan cheese to the gravy.

  5. Add onion juice to the gravy.

  6. Boil the gravy for 1 minute.

  7. Pour some gravy over the fish.

  8. Serve the remaining gravy 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pepper + parmesan cheesetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,322 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Codfish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the covered pan to stay moist.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the bread crumbs brown in the oven.
Veal stock or weak gravy
Provides savory liquid in the pan that becomes the base of the sauce.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust over the fish that holds in moisture.
Parmesan cheese
Adds savory, salty flavor and body to the sauce as it melts into the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fish and sharpens the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in browned flour. Flour thickens liquid only when it is mixed in evenly and heated; lumps form if the flour-butter is added to hot gravy without being stirred in well. Boiling afterward cooks out the raw flour taste and sets the sauce's body.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, lemon, veal, pepper, bread, parmesan cheese):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, veal, pepper, bread, parmesan cheese. 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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