Skip to main content
Main

Mayonnaise De Turbot a LA Moderne

A plated dish of flaked turbot served with mayonnaise and salad, topped with cucumber or beetroot rings and hard‑boiled egg halves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turbot and sauce 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 ↓

Mayonnaise De Turbot a LA Moderne

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin and bones from the turbot and flake the fish.

  2. Season the salad with a little oil, vinegar, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

Assemble and serve

  1. In a round dish, place a tablespoon of mayonnaise, then layer salad and fish with alternate layers of mayonnaise.

  2. Shape the layers into a dome.

  3. Mask the entire dish with mayonnaise.

  4. Decorate the top with rings of cucumber or beetroot and place halves of hard-boiled eggs around the edge.

  5. Serve immediately after dressing.

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. Turbot + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together248 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Vinegar + cucumbertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Pepper + cucumbertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,991 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Turbot
Provides the flaked, firm fish that forms the body of the dish.
Mayonnaise sauce
Adds moisture and richness, binding the salad and fish layers together.
Green salad
Adds crisp texture and freshness between the fish layers.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add soft, rich texture and a mild, creamy flavour as garnish.

The step that matters

Make the mayonnaise rather stiff. A stiff mayonnaise holds its shape when the layers are domed and masked, while a loose one would slump and let the salad and fish weep liquid.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turbot, sauce, cream, vinegar, pepper, egg. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes