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Whole Turbot Garnished

A whole turbot is boiled and garnished with lobster, crawfish, parsley, sea salt, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Whole Turbot Garnished

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the turbot in cold water.

  2. Rub coarse sea salt over the turbot.

  3. Dry the turbot with a soft cloth.

  4. Cut the lemon in half and dip the cut side in salt.

  5. Rub the salted cut side over the white side of the fish.

Boil and prepare the lobster

  1. Boil the turbot in a special kettle to prevent breaking.

  2. While the fish is boiling, cook the lobster.

  3. Remove the lobster meat from the shell without breaking it.

  4. Cut the lobster meat into large slices.

Garnish and serve

  1. Arrange the lobster slices and crawfish on the turbot using skewers for decoration.

  2. Make lobster sauce with smaller pieces of lobster.

  3. Serve the lobster sauce with the 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Turbot + parsleytop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together264 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  4. Lobster + parsleytop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together890 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Turbot + lemontop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Turbot
Forms the main flesh of the dish, cooked whole so it stays moist and flaky.
Lobster
Adds sweet, tender meat for the garnish and the sauce.
Crawfish
Adds sweet shellfish meat as a decorative garnish on the fish.

The step that matters

Boil the turbot in a special kettle to prevent breaking. A whole fish is fragile and can fall apart in rough boiling. Gentle, even heat in a fish kettle that supports the body keeps the flesh intact and moist.

“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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