Skip to main content
Sauce

Cardinal Sauce

A sauce made from béchamel, fish fumet, truffle essence, cream, and red lobster butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sauce and lobster are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,095 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cardinal Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the béchamel sauce.

  2. Add the fish fumet and truffle essence, then reduce by a quarter.

  3. Finish the sauce with cream and red lobster butter just before serving.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the dish.

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. Sauce + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Cream + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Truffle + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Béchamel sauce
Forms the creamy base that gives the sauce its body and coating texture.
Fish fumet
Adds concentrated seafood flavour as it reduces, deepening the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel when stirred in at the end.
Red lobster butter
Adds fat and rich shellfish aroma, finishing the sauce's flavour and gloss.

The step that matters

Reduce the sauce by a quarter. Reducing concentrates flavour and thickens the liquid through evaporation. Reducing too far or too fast can scorch the sauce or make it too thick, so keep the heat gentle and watch the volume.

“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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes