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To Pot Lobster Cold

A cold lobster dish prepared by mixing claw and tail meat with seasonings and clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and white pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,695 recipes. Both carry myrcene, which smells balsamic, herbaceous. The science ↓

To Pot Lobster Cold

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Remove the meat from the claws and mix it with the spawn, coral, and seasonings in a mortar.

  2. Add melted butter until it forms a paste.

  3. Take the meat from the tail and beat it in the same way.

Pot and seal

  1. Place half of the tail meat in the bottom of a pot and the rest on top.

  2. Cover the entire mixture with clarified butter.

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. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  2. Lobster + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

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

  3. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Lobster meat
Forms the bulk of the pot, giving it a rich, firm, meaty texture.
Spawn and coral
Adds a deeper, richer flavour and colour to the lobster paste.
Thick melted butter
Binds the meat into a paste and adds richness and smooth texture.
Clarified butter
Seals the surface, keeping the mixture moist and protected from air.

The step that matters

Beating the meat into a smooth paste. If the meat is not pounded finely and mixed well with the butter, the paste stays coarse and uneven. Thorough beating breaks up fibres so the butter can bind everything into a smooth, spreadable texture.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, meat, mace, pepper, butter. 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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