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Boiled Cod

Boiled cod served with butter, lemon juice, and a butter‑lemon egg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Boiled Cod

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Sew the fish in mosquito netting.

  2. Place the fish in a pot of boiling salted water.

  3. Cook for 1 hour.

Finish the fish

  1. Remove the netting and place the fish on a hot dish.

  2. Rub the fish thoroughly with butter and lemon juice.

Make the egg sauce

  1. Prepare the egg sauce by combining butter, lemon juice, salt, and pepper in a saucepan.

  2. Beat the mixture until thick and hot, but do not let it boil.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg yolks.

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 + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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 main body of the dish and cooks to firm, flaky flesh.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the fish and sauce a smooth, moist mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fish and cuts through the richness of the butter.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the sauce, binding the butter and lemon into a smooth emulsion.

The step that matters

Keep the egg sauce below boiling. Egg yolks thicken at moderate heat but scramble and curdle when overheated. Beating the sauce until thick and hot without letting it boil, then removing it from the heat before adding the yolks, keeps the sauce smooth.

“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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