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Cod Pie

A baked cod dish with butter, broth, cream, flour, lemon, and nutmeg, topped with a crust.

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

Cod Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Salt the cod well and let it sit overnight.

  2. Wash the cod and season it with pepper, salt, and a pinch of nutmeg.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the cod in a dish, add some butter, and pour in a little broth.

  2. Cover the dish with a crust and bake until done.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine 1 spoonful of broth, ½ cup of cream, a little flour, and butter.

  2. Add grated lemon and nutmeg and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Add oysters if desired before serving.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cod
Forms the flaky, mild main body of the pie.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and carries flavor through the dish.
Broth
Supplies moisture and savory depth to the fish and sauce.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and fish.

The step that matters

Bring the flour sauce to a boil. Whisk the flour into the cream and broth before heating so it does not clump. Bringing the mixture to a boil swells the starch and thickens the sauce, and cooking it briefly removes the raw flour taste.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, nutmeg, butter, cream, flour. 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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