Skip to main content
Sauce

Cardinal Sauce

A sauce made from reduced Velouté, mushroom essence, lobster butter, anchovy essence, lemon juice, cayenne, and flavored with meat or fish liquor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, combine the reduced Velouté sauce, mushroom essence, lobster butter, anchovy essence, lemon juice, and cayenne.

  2. Mix well and strain the sauce through a fine sieve into a bain-marie.

Finish

  1. Reduce the essence or liquor of the meat or fish to a glaze and incorporate it into the sauce before serving for added flavor.

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 + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Lobster + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

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

  4. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Mushroom + meattop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,423 recipes

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

Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Reduced velouté sauce
Provides the base body and thickness through its starch-thickened structure.
Lobster butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying shellfish flavor through the sauce.
Essence of mushrooms
Adds concentrated earthy, savory flavor depth.
Essence of anchovies
Adds salty, savory depth that rounds out the other flavors.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Reduce the essence to a glaze. Reducing concentrates the flavor and gives the essence a syrupy body. Reducing it fully before adding it keeps the sauce from becoming thin or diluted, and adding it near serving preserves its aroma.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, mushroom, lobster, butter, meat):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Grapefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Applefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, mushroom, lobster, butter, meat. 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

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes