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Sauce

Fish Sauces

A sauce made from lobster stock, butter, flour, and cream, finished with lemon juice and lobster flesh.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fish Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Remove the flesh from the lobster.

  2. Boil the shells in fish stock.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour.

  3. Add the strained stock.

  4. Add the lobster spawn, if possible.

  5. Boil for five minutes.

  6. Strain the mixture.

  7. Add the cream.

  8. Add the lemon juice.

  9. Add the lobster flesh cut into small pieces.

  10. Reheat the sauce.

  11. Serve with almost any kind of fish.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  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
Melts with the flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth, body-giving sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.
Lobster flesh
Adds the main lobster flavour and tender pieces to the sauce.
Lobster spawn
Adds concentrated lobster flavour and a rich colour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour. Flour must be cooked briefly in the melted butter before liquid is added; otherwise the sauce can taste raw and form lumps when the stock goes in.

“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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