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Turbot a Veau Sel

Turbot cooked with sea salt, vinegar or lemon juice, served with a lobster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Turbot a Veau Sel

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the turbot

  1. Bring a pot of water to a boil and add a little coarse sea salt and vinegar or lemon juice.

  2. Add the turbot and cook for no more than 45 minutes.

  3. Drain the turbot and serve it with the sauce separately.

Make the lobster sauce

  1. For the lobster sauce, cut the lobster flesh into small dice and keep the eggs.

  2. Pound the lobster eggs with a little butter and strain through a fine sieve.

  3. Prepare a thick white sauce and mix in the lobster eggs, a little anchovy butter, and cream.

  4. Do not let the sauce boil to prevent curdling.

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. Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Turbot + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together127 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Butter + caviartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together107 recipes

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

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, with firm, flaky flesh that holds its shape when poached.
Hen lobster
Its flesh adds sweet, delicate seafood flavour, and its eggs colour and enrich the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the lobster egg mixture and sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and body, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded texture.

The step that matters

Keep the lobster sauce below a boil. Boiling a cream-based sauce containing egg and butter can cause it to curdle and separate, so it should be kept warm and gently heated instead.

“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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