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Baked Codfish and Oyster Sauce

A baked cod dish with butter, lemon, and water, served after baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 Codfish and Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin from the cod slices.

  2. Butter a sauté pan generously and place the cod slices in it.

  3. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and a few drops of lemon juice.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour in the water and cover with a thickly buttered round of white paper.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about 15 minutes, until the flesh separates from the bone.

  3. Transfer to a hot serving dish and strain any liquid from the pan over the cod.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cod
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming flaky and tender as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping keep the fish moist and flavourful in the pan.
Water
Creates gentle steam under the paper, cooking the fish evenly without drying it out.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the mild fish.

The step that matters

Covering with buttered paper before baking. The buttered paper traps steam and holds moisture around the fish, so it cooks gently and stays moist. Without it, the surface can dry out before the flesh is cooked through.

“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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