Skip to main content
Sauce

Gobble Sauce

A creamy sauce with anchovy essence, lime juice, and spices, served with prawns or shrimp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,491 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Gobble Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour until smooth.

  3. Add the cream and mix well.

  4. Stir in the anchovy essence, salt, cayenne, mace, and lime juice.

Add the seafood

  1. Add the prawns or shrimp and heat gently until hot, but do not boil.

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. Pepper + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Anchovy + shrimptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  4. Butter + shrimptop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Forms the fat base of the sauce and carries its flavour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, pourable body.
Anchovy essence
Adds a salty, savoury depth of flavour to the sauce.
Prawns or shrimp
Provide the main protein, gently warmed in the sauce so they stay tender.

The step that matters

Heating the prawns or shrimp. Gentle heating keeps the seafood tender. Boiling toughens proteins and can cause a thickened cream sauce to break or curdle, so the sauce should stay just hot.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, cream, anchovy, pepper, lime, shrimp):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, anchovy, pepper, lime, shrimp. 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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes