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Dinner. Small Turbot or Brill, Shrimp Sauce.

A fish served with a sauce of sautéed shrimp, butter, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Dinner. Small Turbot or Brill, Shrimp Sauce.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and prepare the small turbot or brill.

Cook the fish

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

Make the shrimp sauce

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

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

Serve

  1. Serve the fish topped with the shrimp sauce.

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 or brill
Provides the main flaky white fish that forms the body of the dish.
Shrimp
Adds sweet, tender seafood flavour to the sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Carries flavour and adds richness to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and seafood flavours.

The step that matters

Sautéing the shrimp until pink. Shrimp turn firm and rubbery when overcooked, so they should be removed once just pink and opaque. Adding the lemon juice after the shrimp are cooked keeps the sauce balanced.

“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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