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Turbot a LA Reine

A dish of sliced turbot cooked in a sauce of flour, butter, stock, cream, oysters, and seasonings, finished with an egg yolk liaison.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Turbot a LA Reine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Cut the dressed turbot into slices.

  2. Mix flour with butter and moisten with stock seasoned with pepper, salt, nutmeg, and lemon peel.

  3. Add cream and the fish to the mixture, along with the stewed oysters.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, mix egg yolks with cream and lemon juice, then add to the dish.

  2. Do not let it boil after adding the liaison.

  3. Serve garnished with fried snippets of bread.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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, providing the flaky fish that the sauce surrounds.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a sauce that holds the fish and oysters together.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, adding richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Egg yolks
Act as a liaison that thickens and enriches the cream sauce at the end.
Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour and tender texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Do not let it boil after adding the liaison. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated but curdle and turn grainy if they boil, so the sauce must stay below boiling once the yolk mixture goes in.

“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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