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Salt Cod D LA Maitre Dd Hotel

Salt cod served in a butter‑flour sauce with parsley, lemon, and optional cream, garnished with puff pastry croutons and fried potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Salt Cod D LA Maitre Dd Hotel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak the salt cod in cold water to remove excess salt.

  2. Place the fish in a large pot of cold water and bring to a boil.

  3. Once boiling, remove from heat and cover to keep warm.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt the butter, add flour, water, and a little salt, stirring until combined.

  2. Taste the fish and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper if needed.

  3. Heat the sauce gently without boiling until it thickens, stirring well.

  4. Mix in chopped parsley, lemon juice, and glaze, adjusting color with cream if too brown.

  5. Remove skin and bones from the fish and gently mix it into the sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep dish or vol-au-vent, garnished with puff pastry croutons and fried potatoes.

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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; soaking removes excess salt so the fish is seasoned mildly.
Butter
Forms the fat base of the sauce, giving it richness and a smooth texture.
Flour
Thickens the butter mixture into a sauce that holds together and coats the fish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.
Thick cream
Lightens the colour and adds richness to the sauce when it is too brown.

The step that matters

Heat the sauce gently without boiling. Flour-thickened sauces can turn grainy or break if they boil hard. Gentle heat lets the starch swell evenly into a smooth, thick sauce.

“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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