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Sauce

Matelotte Sauce a LA Normande

A seafood sauce made with crayfish, mussels, oysters, mushrooms, anchovies, white wine, oyster liquor, and Velouté.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and white wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,765 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Matelotte Sauce a LA Normande

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine crayfish tails, mussels, oysters, mushrooms, anchovies, white wine, oyster liquor, and Velouté sauce in a pot.

  2. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve and set the sauce aside in a cool place until needed.

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. Mushroom + white winetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  2. Crayfish + saucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together195 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Crayfish + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Oyster + saucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Crayfish + white winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Crayfish tails
Provide the shellfish flavour and body that form the base of the sauce.
Oysters
Add briny, savoury flavour and body to the sauce as they cook down.
White wine
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and helps extract flavour from the shellfish.
Velouté sauce
Thickens the liquid and gives the sauce a smooth, velvety body.

The step that matters

Simmer covered for 1 hour. Keeping the pot covered limits evaporation so the liquid stays concentrated, while gentle simmering extracts flavour without toughening the shellfish. Boiling vigorously can make the seafood rubbery and cloud the sauce.

“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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