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Sauce

Lobster Sauce

A sauce made from lobster meat, water or veal broth, allspice, pepper, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Lobster Sauce

Why it works: Allspice and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 654 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lobster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Remove the meat from the lobster shell and claws, and break it into small pieces.

  2. If using a hen lobster, extract the coral and spawn and pound it finely in a mortar.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the broken shells in ½ cup of water or veal broth with ground allspice, whole pepper, and grated horseradish.

  2. Let the mixture boil to infuse the flavors.

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. Allspice + horseradishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

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

  5. Meat + vealtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster meat
Forms the main body of the sauce and provides its seafood flavor.
Lobster shells
Release savory flavor into the liquid as they boil.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent bite that brightens the rich seafood flavor.

The step that matters

Let the mixture boil to infuse the flavors. Boiling the shells long enough extracts their flavor into the liquid. Too short a boil leaves the sauce thin and weak in taste, while the pungent horseradish can turn harsh if it is over-boiled.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, lobster, veal, allspice, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, lobster, veal, allspice, 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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