Name: Cardinal Sauce
Ingredients: ½ pint White or Cream Béchamel Sauce; 1 ounce Lobster Butter; 1 teaspoon essence of anchovy; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Lobster and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 470 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Cardinal Sauce

Ingredients

½ pint White or Cream Béchamel Sauce
1 ounce Lobster Butter
1 teaspoon essence of anchovy
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

In a saucepan, combine the béchamel sauce and lobster butter.
Add the anchovy essence and coarse sea salt to taste.
Heat the mixture until very hot, then serve.

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.

Lobster + anchovytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together470 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).
Cream + lobstertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,050 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,697 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Cream + anchovytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together798 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

White or cream béchamel sauce: Forms the smooth, creamy body of the sauce.
Lobster butter: Adds fat and rich lobster flavour that carries through the sauce.
Essence of anchovy: Adds a savoury, salty depth that rounds out the flavour.

The step that matters

Heating the mixture until very hot. Béchamel is a flour-thickened sauce that can scorch on the bottom of the pan or turn lumpy if overheated too quickly. Heating gently while stirring keeps it smooth, and the butter stays emulsified in 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.