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Boiled Turbot with Lobster Sauce

A boiled turbot served with a sauce made from lobster, butter, flour, milk, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turbot and lobster work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 163 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Boiled Turbot with Lobster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash the turbot thoroughly with coarse sea salt to remove slime, then rinse in cold water.

  2. Remove the intestines and wash the fish again.

  3. Place the turbot in a large kettle and cover it with salted cold water.

  4. Boil gently for about 20 minutes, until the flesh begins to separate from the bones.

  5. Carefully remove the fish and garnish with parsley or lobster.

Make the lobster sauce

  1. For the lobster sauce, boil the lobster, remove it from the shell, and mash the lobster through a sieve.

  2. Mix the lobster with an equal quantity of butter.

  3. In a thick saucepan, heat 2 tablespoons of butter and 2 tablespoons of flour until bubbling.

  4. Gradually stir in ½ cup of milk and ½ cup of water.

  5. Season the sauce with salt and cayenne, color it with lobster butter, and add 1 cup of lobster meat.

  6. Once the sauce boils, serve it with the turbot.

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. Turbot + lobstertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Turbot
Is the main fish, cooked gently in salted water until its flesh separates from the bones.
Lobster
Provides the flavour and colour of the sauce, both as mashed butter and as meat pieces.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and carries lobster flavour and colour through it.
Flour
Thickens the milk and water into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter.

The step that matters

Adding the milk and water to the roux. Liquid added too quickly to a hot butter and flour roux can clump instead of blending. Adding it gradually while stirring keeps the sauce smooth and evenly thickened.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turbot, lobster, butter, flour, milk, meat):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against turbot, lobster, butter, flour, milk, meat. 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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