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Sauce

Cardinal Sauce

A creamy fish sauce made with béchamel, fish fumet, truffle essence, cream, and red lobster butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and lobster are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,095 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cardinal Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the Bechamel sauce.

  2. Add fish fumet and truffle essence, then reduce by a quarter.

  3. Finish with cream and red lobster butter when serving.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the boiled 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. Sauce + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Cream + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Truffle + buttertop 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

Bechamel sauce
Forms the creamy base that gives the sauce body and a smooth, coating texture.
Fish fumet
Adds concentrated fish flavour, and reducing it intensifies the taste.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the finished sauce.
Red lobster butter
Adds fat and rich lobster flavour and aroma to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Reduce the fumet mixture by a quarter. Reducing concentrates the flavour of the fumet and thickens the liquid. Stopping too early leaves the sauce thin and weak in taste, while reducing too far can make it overly salty or sticky.

“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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