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Curried Lobster

A lobster dish cooked in a butter‑flour sauce with curry powder, lemon juice, and milk, baked with buttered crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Curried Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cream the butter and flour together.

  2. Add the scalded milk, lemon juice, curry powder, salt, and pepper to the mixture.

  3. Remove the lobster meat from the shells and cut it into half‑inch cubes.

  4. Add the lobster cubes to the sauce.

Fill and bake

  1. Refill the lobster shells with the mixture.

  2. Cover the shells with buttered crumbs.

  3. Bake until the crumbs are brown.

  4. Alternatively, use a buttered baking dish instead of the shells.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Lobsters
Provide the main protein, which is cooked gently in the creamy sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and helps the crumbs brown during baking.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Milk
Forms the body of the sauce, giving it a rich, creamy texture.
Cracker crumbs
Form a crisp, browned topping when baked over the sauce.

The step that matters

Bake until the crumbs are brown. Baking only until the crumbs turn golden keeps the lobster tender and moist, while overbaking dries the meat and toughens it.

“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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