Name: Lobster Sauce
Ingredients: meat of 1 lobster; ½ cup water or veal broth; ¼ teaspoon ground allspice or broken mace; ¼ teaspoon whole pepper; 1 teaspoon grated horseradish

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

meat of 1 lobster
½ cup water or veal broth
¼ teaspoon ground allspice or broken mace
¼ teaspoon whole pepper
1 teaspoon grated horseradish

Directions

Prepare the lobster

Remove the meat from the lobster shell and claws, breaking it into small pieces.
If using a hen lobster, extract the coral and spawn, then pound it finely in a mortar.

Make the sauce

Boil the broken shells in ½ cup of water or veal broth with allspice, whole pepper, and grated horseradish.
Let the mixture boil for a few minutes.

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.

Allspice + horseradishtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together654 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,395 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,646 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together909 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
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 gives it its characteristic seafood flavour.
Lobster shells: Simmered in the liquid to release savoury, shellfish flavour into the sauce.
Horseradish: Adds a sharp, pungent bite that balances the richness of the seafood.
Allspice: Contributes warm, aromatic spice notes to the broth.

Swap the horseradish

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

Capsicumfits better
Mustardfits better
Carrotfits better
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.