Why it works: Sauce and lobster are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,095 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓
Cardinal Sauce
Ingredients
Directions
Rub the lobster spawn through a sieve.
Add the spawn to the white sauce and let it boil for 5 minutes.
Serve with fish.
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.
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Sauce + lobstertop 6% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,095 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- White sauce
- Forms the creamy base that carries the flavour of the spawn.
- Lobster spawn
- Gives the sauce its distinctive lobster flavour and a pinkish colour.
The step that matters
Boiling the sauce with the spawn. Once roe or egg-rich ingredients are heated, they can thicken unevenly or turn grainy if the sauce is overheated, so the boil should be kept controlled for the full 5 minutes.
“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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