Skip to main content
Sauce

Lobster Sauce

A sauce made from lobster body, flesh, spawn, butter, beef gravy, salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Lobster Sauce

Why it works: Butter and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Lobster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Remove the gills from the lobster and add the body to thick melted butter.

  2. Pull the flesh into small bits and mix with the beef gravy.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the mixture, then add salt and lemon juice before serving.

  2. Pound the lobster spawn very finely and rub it through a sieve.

  3. Mix the spawn with melted butter and add the lobster meat cut into small bits.

  4. Heat the mixture without boiling.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Butter + beeftop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Lobster + buttertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

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

  4. Beef + lemontop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,278 recipes

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

  5. Lobster + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together137 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main flavour and the tender meat that forms the body of the sauce.
Lobster spawn
Adds rich colour and a deeper lobster flavour when rubbed smooth into the butter.
Butter
Carries flavour and gives the sauce a rich, smooth, fatty mouthfeel.
Beef gravy
Adds savoury depth and body to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and seafood flavours.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture without boiling. Once the butter and egg-rich spawn are combined, boiling can cause the emulsion to break and separate into greasy liquid and solids, so gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, butter, beef):

  1. Coconutfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Applefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, butter, beef. 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.

More lobster sauce recipes

Newburg 3 See all 230 →

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes