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Turbot with Cream Sauce

A fish dish of diced turbot simmered in a creamy sauce of milk, cream, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Turbot with Cream Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine milk, onion, mace, and a dust of cayenne pepper in a saucepan.

  2. Boil the mixture for 15 minutes.

  3. Melt butter in another saucepan and stir in flour until smooth.

  4. Strain the seasoned milk into the butter-flour mixture.

  5. Stir until the mixture re-boils.

  6. Season to taste with pepper and salt.

Assemble and serve

  1. Remove bones and skin from the warm fish and cut the fish into dice.

  2. Add the diced fish to the saucepan with the milk mixture.

  3. Stir in the cream and bring to a boil.

  4. Prepare a potato border on a dish.

  5. Pour the fish mixture into the center of the border.

  6. Sprinkle the sieved hard-boiled yolk and chopped parsley before serving.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 flaky texture and savoury flavour.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and carries flavour, and with flour forms the base roux.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it cooks.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel to the sauce.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and colour as a sieved garnish on the finished dish.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce until it re-boils. Flour thickens only once the starch granules swell in simmering liquid. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and floury, and stirring prevents lumps from forming at the bottom of the pan.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turbot, pepper, flour, butter, cream, egg, parsley):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turbot, pepper, flour, butter, cream, egg, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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