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Cod with Cream Sauce

A cod fillet cooked in a butter and flour roux with stock, cream, and lemon, served with a strained sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and dry the fish thoroughly.

Cook the fish

  1. Melt 14 oz of butter in a stewpan, add the cod, and fry quickly on both sides without browning.

  2. Add the stock, cover closely, and simmer gently for about 20 minutes.

  3. Place the fish on a hot dish.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the remaining 4 oz of butter, stir in the flour, and add the stock from cooking the fish along with enough milk to make 1 pint.

  2. Boil and simmer for about 10 minutes to cook the flour.

  3. Add the cream and lemon juice, season, and strain the sauce over the fish.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Cod
Forms the flaky, tender main body of the dish.
Butter
Enriches the fish and provides fat that carries flavor and gives the sauce richness.
Flour
Thickens the stock and milk into a smooth, coating sauce once cooked through.
White stock
Adds savory flavor to the sauce and moistens the fish as it simmers.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the finished sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and cream sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the cod quickly without browning. Brief frying over moderate heat seals the surface while keeping the fish tender. Prolonged or strong heat browns the proteins and firms them up, making the fish dry and the pale sauce less delicate.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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