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Sauce

Shrimp Sauce to Use with Fish

A buttery shrimp sauce with paprika, anchovy paste, mustard, lobster, and shrimp, served over boiled fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Anchovy and lobster work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 470 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Shrimp Sauce to Use with Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for a minute.

  3. Add paprika and salt to taste.

  4. Pour in the soup stock and stir until thickened.

  5. Mix in anchovy paste and French mustard.

  6. Add the lobster and shrimps, and heat through.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over 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. Anchovy + lobstertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Lobster + shrimptop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together403 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Anchovy + shrimptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  4. Butter + shrimptop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

Butter
Melted fat that forms the base of the sauce and carries flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the melted butter into a roux.
Soup stock
Liquid that hydrates the roux and becomes the body of the sauce.
Lobster
Adds sweet seafood flavour and texture to the sauce.
Shrimps
Adds sweet seafood flavour and texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Pour in the soup stock and stir until thickened. Adding liquid to a roux all at once can make lumps; stirring constantly while the liquid is added lets the starch swell evenly into a smooth sauce.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, anchovy, lobster, shrimp):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, anchovy, lobster, shrimp. 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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