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Cod Pie

A baked cod dish with a buttery sauce, seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and optional oysters or parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 the cod

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

  2. Wash the cod.

  3. Season it with pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the cod in a dish and add butter.

  2. Pour in the broth.

  3. Cover the dish with a crust.

  4. Bake until done.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine broth, cream, flour, butter, lemon zest, and nutmeg in a saucepan.

  2. Bring to a boil.

  3. Add oysters or parsley if desired.

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 main body of the pie, cooked gently within the crust.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the fish instead of running thin.
Broth
Provides savoury liquid that moistens the fish and forms the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and flavour in both the fish and the sauce.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a boil. Flour only thickens fully once the starch granules swell in boiling liquid. Stopping short leaves the sauce thin and pasty-tasting, while stirring prevents lumps and scorching on the base of the pan.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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