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Sauce

Lobster Sauce for Turbot

A sauce for turbot made with water, flour, butter, stock, lobster, mushrooms, truffles, and anchovy essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and truffle are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,900 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lobster Sauce for Turbot

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Boil 1 pint of water in a 3‑pint saucepan.

  2. Mix 3 tablespoons of flour with ½ pint of cold water in a bowl until smooth.

  3. Strain the flour mixture through a fine strainer.

  4. When the water boils, stir in the flour mixture gradually, stirring until it thickens to the consistency of double cream.

  5. After boiling for 2 minutes, stir in ¼ pound of fresh butter until fully combined.

Prepare the lobster

  1. Prepare the lobster by breaking off the claws and tail, and chopping the body finely.

  2. In a separate pan, combine the lobster body with ½ cup of second stock, and bring to a boil.

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. Mushroom + truffletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Mushroom + sherrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Oyster + anchovytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, creamy sauce as it cooks.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Lobster (in the method)
Provides the main shellfish flavour of the sauce.
Second stock
Adds savoury depth and liquid for extracting flavour from the lobster body.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into boiling water. Adding the flour slurry gradually while stirring prevents lumps, because flour clumps when it hits hot liquid all at once and starch must disperse evenly to thicken smoothly.

“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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