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Boiled Cod and Oyster Sauce

A boiled cod served with a sauce made from butter, flour, oyster liquor, cream, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Boiled Cod and Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the cod

  1. Fill a fish kettle with enough water to cover the fish.

  2. Add enough salt to make the water taste salty.

  3. Bring the water to a boil.

  4. Add the cod and cook slowly for about 15 minutes until done.

Make the oyster sauce

  1. In a stewpan, add the oysters with their liquor.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Strain the oyster liquor into a basin.

  4. Remove the gills and hard parts from the oysters.

  5. Cut the soft parts of the oysters into two pieces.

  6. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  7. Add the flour to the butter.

  8. Add the oyster liquor to the mixture.

  9. Boil the sauce for 5 minutes.

  10. Stir in the cream.

  11. Stir in salt.

  12. Stir in cayenne pepper.

  13. Stir in lemon juice.

  14. Stir in the pieces of oysters.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish on a napkin.

  2. Serve the sauce in a sauceboat.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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
Provides the flaky white fish that is the main body of the dish.
Oysters
Give the sauce its briny, savoury flavour and tender pieces of shellfish.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and rich flavour as it melts into the flour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and oyster liquor into a smooth, body-giving sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce for 5 minutes. Boiling the butter and flour mixture with the liquor cooks out the raw flour taste and fully thickens the sauce. Cream and lemon juice are added afterwards so the cream is not curdled or overcooked.

“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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