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Turbot a LA Bechamel

A dish of boiled turbot flakes topped with béchamel sauce and garnished with potato croquettes, puff pastry fleurons, or bread croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and turbot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 248 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Turbot a LA Bechamel

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Prepare a good rich cream béchamel sauce.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the flakes of boiled turbot to the sauce and toss them lightly over the fire.

  2. Serve the turbot piled up on a dish in the form of a dome.

  3. Garnish the dish with potato croquettes, fleurons of puff pastry, or croutons 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. Sauce + turbottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together248 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Cream + turbottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together127 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  4. Potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Cream + potatotop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,481 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream béchamel sauce
Provides a rich, smooth base that carries the fish and keeps it moist.
Boiled turbot
Supplies the flaked fish that forms the main body of the dish.

The step that matters

Tossing the turbot in the sauce. Turbot flakes easily and turns dry or ragged if overheated or stirred hard. Tossing them lightly over the heat only warms them through and keeps the flakes intact and the sauce creamy.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sauce, turbot, bread):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sauce, turbot, bread. 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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