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Sauce

Cardinal Sauce

A creamy lobster sauce made with white sauce, lobster, cream, lemon, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Cardinal Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare 1 pint of White sauce as directed.

  2. Stir in 1 ounce of finely chopped lobster coral, nutmeg, salt, and pepper to taste.

  3. Simmer gently for about 15 minutes.

  4. Pass the mixture through a fine strainer or tammy cloth.

  5. Reheat the sauce, then add 2 tablespoons of cream and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.

  6. Use as required.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Cream + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster coral
Gives the sauce its colour and a rich seafood flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Pass the mixture through a fine strainer or tammy cloth. Straining removes the coarse bits of coral so the sauce ends up smooth rather than gritty or flecked.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, cream, lobster, nutmeg, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, cream, lobster, nutmeg, pepper. 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.

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