Name: To Cook Codfish and Make Oyster-Sauce
Ingredients: 1 pound codfish; 1 dozen oysters; ½ ounce butter; ¼ ounce flour; 1 tablespoon cream; lemon juice to taste; Cayenne pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,039 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Cook Codfish and Make Oyster-Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Wash the codfish in cold water.
In a small fish kettle, bring water to a boil and add enough salt to make it taste salty.
Place the codfish on a drainer in the boiling water and let it cook for 15 minutes without boiling fast.
Check if the cod is cooked; the flesh should separate from the bones.
Serve the cod on a folded napkin on a hot dish with oyster sauce.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Lemon + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together27,039 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + creamtop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together41,494 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Oyster + buttertop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together8,175 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).
Butter + flourtop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together122,858 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + lemontop 8% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together41,197 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Butter and flour share little aroma chemistry, yet 122,858 recipes mention both: they likely work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, butter, flour, cream, pepper):

Lemonthe original
Strawberryabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, butter, flour, cream, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).