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Potted Lobsters

A preserved lobster dish made by boiling, seasoning, and packing the meat into pots with clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Potted Lobsters

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Wash lobsters in a tub with plenty of weak saltwater, then rinse them in pure water.

  2. Boil lobsters in salted water with saltpetre until cooked.

  3. Cool lobsters on a sieve.

  4. Remove the meat from the shells and claws, discarding skins and specks, and separate the coral.

  5. Cut the meat into dice.

Make the mixture

  1. Pound the diced meat in a mortar until smooth, adding clarified butter as needed.

  2. Season the mixture with nutmeg, bay leaf, white pepper, and cloves. Mix well.

Pot and bake

  1. Fill white pots with the mixture.

  2. Place some coral in the center of each pot.

  3. Press the mixture down and let it sit overnight.

  4. Place the pots in a slow oven to dry without changing the color.

  5. Let them cool.

  6. Cover the tops with clarified butter.

  7. Seal with writing paper.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + white peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. White pepper + clovetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together752 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobsters
Provide the main meat, which sets into a firm, rich potted texture when pounded.
Clarified butter
Adds fat and smoothness to the pounded meat and seals the top of each pot.
Saltpetre
Helps the lobster meat keep its pink colour during boiling and drying.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic flavour that complements the sweet lobster meat.

The step that matters

Pounding the meat smooth. Meat that is not pounded finely and evenly stays grainy and separates when potted. Adding clarified butter gradually keeps the mixture moist and spreadable, giving a smooth, cohesive texture.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, butter, nutmeg, clove. 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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