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Sauce

Gobble Sauce for Fish

A creamy sauce for fish made with butter, flour, cream, spices, anchovy essence, lemon juice, and shrimp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Gobble Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and mix it smoothly with the flour.

  2. Add the cream or milk, cayenne, nutmeg, essence of anchovies, and lemon juice.

  3. Stir in the shelled shrimps and heat until hot, but do not let it 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melted with the flour to form a smooth roux that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Combines with the melted butter to thicken the sauce into a smooth base.
Cream or milk
Adds liquid and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, creamy texture.
Shelled shrimps
Add the main savoury flavour and a tender bite to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the shelled shrimps and heat until hot, but do not let it boil.. Boiling a cream-based sauce can make it separate or curdle and can toughen the shrimp. Gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth and the shrimp tender.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, cream, pepper, nutmeg, shrimp):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, pepper, nutmeg, 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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