Skip to main content
Main

Cod Pie

A baked cod dish with a buttery sauce, seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and lemon zest.

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

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cod Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cod

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

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

Assemble and bake

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

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

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, combine broth, cream, flour, butter, lemon zest, and nutmeg in a saucepan and bring to a boil.

  2. 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

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

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

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 and flakes into tender pieces when cooked.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, giving it a smooth, silky texture.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the fish instead of running thin.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and flavor in both the fish and the sauce.

The step that matters

Salting the cod overnight. Salt draws moisture out of the fish and then, as it is rinsed and absorbed, seasons the flesh more deeply. Under-salting leaves it bland and over-salting makes it too firm and harsh, so the amount and rinsing matter.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, nutmeg, butter, cream, flour, lemon):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Cardamomfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

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