Cod with Lemon Butter Sauce
Costco almost always has nice big fillets of cod fish and they always have that smell of seaweed and salt air. The recipe below came from the Dec 2025/Jan 2026 Bon Appétit Holiday Issue.
As always, magazine recipes seem to come up with the strangest most difficult ways to prepare what should be an easy make. But, this one suggested something I’ve never done before and will do from now on when cooking flaky, delicate, fresh fish. Instead of dredging or tossing the fish in flour, this recipe calls for laying the pieces face down in the flour, shaking off the excess and then letting them rest briefly flour side up until cooking. The rest of the recipe procedures were kind of awkward, so here, I’ve modified them to match what I actually did and you’ll find it super easy to make a perfect presentation.
INGREDIENTS:
one large whole cod skinless, boneless fillet cut into four to six pieces salt and pepper flour 5 tablespoons butter, divided 1 shallot minced juice of 1/2 lemon 1 Tbsp. Dijon Mustard 1 tsp. Honey 1 Tbsp. chopped dried Tarragon plus some loose whole Tarragon leaves as garnish
PROCEDURE:
Pat dry and season cod pieces with salt and pepper. Place flour on a plate and place each piece of cod into the flour so that only one side gets flour. Shake off excess and set aside flour side up.
Heat 2 Tbsp. butter in a large medium hot frying pan and lay each piece of cod flour side down. Depending on the heat, flip them in 2-4 minutes when the flour side is golden. Allow the other side to cook through no more than 2-4 more minutes. It should start to flake but still look somewhat translucent. Set the pieces of cod aside flour side up on a warm plate.
Put the remaining 3 Tbsp. butter in the pan along with the shallots until just starting to turn golden.
Add lemon juice, mustard, honey and chopped dried tarragon along with about 1/3 cup of water.
Blend the ingredients well and continue to reduce until somewhat thickened. Turn off the heat, return the fish to the pan and spoon the sauce over it. Garnish with whole tarragon leaves and more cracked pepper if desired. Serve at once.
The recipe in Bon Appétit suggests serving the fish with roasted potatoes but, we love nothing better than Kentucky Spoon Bread with simply prepared fresh fish.
I got this recipe from a fellow associate at D&W, Bruce Brooking, many years ago. His wife, Kim, who is from the south, brought it to a pot luck and it was a huge hit. It is basically corn bread but the consistency is more like pudding in the English sense of puddings such as Yorkshire Pudding or Spotted Dick.
INGREDIENTS:
1 stick butter (melted but not hot) 2 large eggs 1 cup (8 oz.) sour cream 1 8 oz. can whole kernel corn 1 8 oz. can cream style corn 1 8 oz. box Jiffy Corn Muffin mix
PROCEDURE:
Mix all together in a large bowl and place into a buttered 8” square baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes until firm in the center. The size of the dish is extremely important. Over the years, we’ve found that too small of a dish makes the pudding too deep and it is gummy in the center. Too large and it dries out and becomes bready. You can scoop it out with a spoon as the name implies or cut it into squares for a somewhat more professional presentation. We prefer the latter.
A couple of weeks ago we opened our last bottle of 2018 DuPont-Fahn Auxey-Duresses “Les Vireux” (Chardonnay) Burgundy FR (13% abv) about $50 today with some lobsters we ordered fresh from Maine from the “Lobster Guy”. These were the biggest, freshest lobsters that we’ve had in decades. So, here we are two weeks later and I remembered that there was still about half of the bottle of Auxey-Duresses in the ‘fridge. So, we enjoyed that with our Cod. Even two weeks later, I’d say this is one of the two best white Burgundies I’ve ever had. The other, interestingly enough, was also an Auxey-Duresses; 1983 from the Duc du Magenta that we enjoyed quite often when I worked at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. GREAT STUFF!!!
Enjoy in Good Health,
A Brian Cain, the Michigan Vintner
PS We concluded our meal with a splash of dessert wine that Alice purchased from a handsome young tasting room attendant of whom she was quite taken. The wine is a rose, geranium and damiana infused fortified dessert wine called Quady Deviation (romantic after dinner wine) CA (15% abv) about $25 per 375 ml. As soon as I tasted it about 30+ years ago, I knew I was tasting spoiled wine. As an amateur wine maker, I didn’t know much about making good wine, but I knew every flaw in the book, how to identify it and what causes it. So, the instant I put my nose in the glass I proclaimed “improper use of sorbates”. But Alice liked the unusual floral nuance and purchased a bottle while imagining all the wonderful friends we’d share it with. Because, typically, I am the one who fetches the wines and, knowing it was damaged goods, I never brought it out of the cellar until tonight. For an old cork, it came out easily and in one piece. Thirty years ago it was a red wine. Today it is the color of VSOP Cognac. It poured brilliantly clear and golden though there was a ton of flaky black sediment on the bottom of the bottle. MIRACLE of MIRACLES, the rose, geranium and damiana had disappeared and was replaced by an explosive exotic muscat-like aroma coupled with complex tobacco and spice wood not unlike a Trokenbeerenauslese. Maaaaagnificent!
PPS I still think this wine was a black muscat that accidentally reactivated after adding sorbates and spirits. I gave up making sweet and semi sweet wine many decades ago because I never quite got the knack of using sorbates properly. Maybe I should have kept and aged those old trials instead of dumping them.
