Skip to main content
Main

To Dress Fish

Flaked salt cod topped with a cream and butter sauce flavored with mace, nutmeg, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

To Dress Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cod

  1. Soak salt cod overnight.

  2. Boil the soaked cod until done, then flake it into a dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, combine cream, butter, flour, mace, nutmeg, pepper, and salt; heat until thick.

  2. Pour the sauce over the flaked cod and serve with sliced lemon.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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 protein and savory flavor, and is flaked into the dish.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, forming the body of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor to the sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it a creamy body.

The step that matters

Heating the sauce until thick. Flour must be cooked with the butter and cream long enough to swell and thicken. Under-heating leaves a thin, starchy-tasting sauce, while overheating or scorching can cause lumps or a burnt taste.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

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