Skip to main content
Main

Cod Pie

A cod pie with crust, butter, broth, cream, flour, lemon zest, salt, pepper, nutmeg.

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

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 the cod

  1. Salt the cod well.

  2. Let the cod sit overnight.

  3. Wash the cod.

  4. Season the cod with pepper and nutmeg.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the cod in a dish.

  2. Add butter and a little broth.

  3. Cover the dish with pie crust.

  4. Bake until done.

  5. Add a sauce made from broth, cream, flour, butter, and lemon zest.

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 main body of the pie, providing the flaky filling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and helps keep the fish moist.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, giving it a smooth texture.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the fish rather than running off.

The step that matters

Bake until done. Cod is lean and cooks quickly, so overbaking dries it out and makes it tough. Check that the flesh turns opaque and flakes easily before removing the pie from the oven.

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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes