Skip to main content
Main

Morue Salee a LA Maitre D' Hotel

Salt cod cooked gently, then mixed into a butter‑flour sauce with lemon, parsley, and optional cream.

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

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 14,036 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat, fish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Remove the salt from the fish and place it in a large vessel with water, ensuring it does not boil.

  2. Once it begins to boil, remove it from the heat and cover it to keep it tender.

  3. Remove the skin and bones from the fish.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add flour, water, and a little salt.

  3. Taste and adjust seasoning with more salt and pepper if needed.

  4. Heat the sauce without boiling until it thickens, stirring well to make it smooth.

  5. Mix a pinch of chopped parsley with glaze and lemon juice.

  6. Taste the sauce.

  7. If the sauce is too brown, add a little thick cream to lighten it.

Combine and serve

  1. Gently mix the fish into the sauce.

  2. Serve in a vol‑au‑vent or a deep dish with croutons.

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.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together14,036 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + creamtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together41,494 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together122,858 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Salt cod
Provides the main body of the dish, flaked into the sauce as its protein base.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and flavour as the base for the roux.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth sauce that coats the fish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.
Thick cream
Lightens the colour and softens the texture of an overly brown sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the sauce without boiling. Flour thickens as its starch swells in warm liquid; boiling can cause the sauce to break or turn lumpy, so it should be heated gently while stirring until smooth.

“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

Illustration of Lemon SauceIllustrationLemon Sauce236 recipesIllustration of Tomato SoupIllustrationTomato Soup526 recipesIllustration of Brown BreadIllustrationBrown Bread461 recipesIllustration of Mutton BrothIllustrationMutton Broth292 recipes