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Admiral Sauce

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 405 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Admiral Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare a butter sauce using white seasoned fish stock.

  2. Mix in the pounded anchovies, minced fried shallots, chopped capers, and grated lemon rind.

  3. Serve with bluefish, boiled pickerel, pike, muskallonge, boiled sheephead, boiled weakfish, or Mackinaw trout.

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. Shallot + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sauce + caperstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together678 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + shallottop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce, shallot, capers):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, shallot, capers. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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