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Boiled Turbot with Shrimp Sauce

A boiled turbot served with a shrimp and butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Boiled Turbot with Shrimp Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fish

  1. Boil the turbot in salted water until cooked through.

Make the shrimp sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt the butter and add the shrimp.

  2. Cook the shrimp until pink, then add lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve the shrimp sauce over the boiled 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Shrimp + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Turbot + shrimptop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together90 recipes

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

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Shrimp + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Turbot
Forms the main body of the dish as the cooked fish being served.
Shrimp
Provides the savoury base of the sauce and a pink, cooked seafood flavour.
Butter
Melts to carry the shrimp and add richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and seafood flavours.

The step that matters

Cooking the shrimp until pink. Shrimp turn pink as their proteins set, and overcooking makes them tough and rubbery. Stop once they are just opaque so the sauce stays tender.

“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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