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Sauce

Cardinal Sauce

A sauce made with béchamel, mushroom liquor, lobster coral, butter, lemon juice, meat glaze, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Cardinal Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Reduce the béchamel sauce with the mushroom liquor in a stewpan.

  2. Season the sauce with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  3. Add the lemon juice to the sauce.

  4. Whisk in the butter and lobster coral.

  5. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve back into the stewpan.

  6. Stir in the meat glaze.

Hold

  1. Keep the sauce hot until ready to serve.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Sauce + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Béchamel sauce
Forms the creamy base that the other ingredients are added to and reduced.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy finish to the sauce.
Lobster coral
Adds colour and a rich shellfish flavour to the sauce.
Meat glaze
Adds concentrated savoury depth and body to the sauce.
Mushroom liquor
Adds earthy mushroom flavour and liquid that reduces to concentrate the sauce.

The step that matters

Whisk in the butter and lobster coral. Butter emulsifies into the sauce best when it is added off the heat or over gentle heat. If the sauce boils after the butter goes in, it can separate and turn greasy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, butter, lobster, meat, mushroom, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, butter, lobster, meat, mushroom, pepper, nutmeg. 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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