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To Pot Lobster Cold

A cold lobster dish made by pounding lobster meat with spices and butter, layered in a pot and covered with clarified butter.

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

Prepare the lobster

  1. Remove the meat from the claws, head, and spawn of the lobster.

  2. Take the meat from the tail.

Make the paste

  1. Pound the removed meat in a mortar with the spices and melted butter until it forms a paste.

  2. Pound the tail meat similarly.

Pot and seal

  1. Place half of the pounded meat in the bottom of a pot and the remaining meat 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. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  4. Pepper + white peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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 dish, giving it its rich, savoury flavour and firm, sliceable texture.
Melted butter
Binds the pounded meat into a smooth paste and adds richness and moisture.
Clarified butter
Covers the pot, sealing out air and adding a fat layer that preserves the dish.

The step that matters

Pounding the meat to a paste. Pounding breaks down the meat fibres so the butter and spices blend evenly into a smooth paste rather than a coarse, uneven mixture.

Swap the white pepper

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, 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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