Skip to main content
Main

A Receipt to Pot Lobsters, Which Cost Ten Guineas

A lobster dish baked in butter with mace, nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

A Receipt to Pot Lobsters, Which Cost Ten Guineas

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the lobster

  1. Pick all the meat out of the tails and claws of the lobsters, removing all the black gut.

  2. Beat the mace, nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and salt together.

  3. Season the lobster meat with the spice mixture.

Bake

  1. Layer butter in a deep earthen pot.

  2. Add the lobster meat.

  3. Cover with the remaining butter.

  4. Tie a paper over the pot.

  5. Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven until tender.

  6. Remove the lobsters.

  7. Let them drain on a dish.

Pot and seal

  1. Place the lobsters whole in potting pots, splitting the tails but keeping them intact.

  2. Pour a spoonful or two of the red butter they were baked in on top.

  3. Melt a little white wax in the remaining butter.

  4. Cover the lobsters.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobsters
Provide the tender meat that is the main substance of the dish.
Butter
Surrounds the lobster during baking, keeping it moist and carrying the flavour.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the lobster meat.
Nutmeg
Contributes a warm, aromatic spice flavour that complements the lobster.

The step that matters

Baking until tender. Baking at a low 300°F gently cooks the lobster so the proteins set without toughening. Overbaking squeezes out moisture and leaves the meat dry and rubbery, so watch for tenderness rather than the clock.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

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

You might also like

Lobster SauceLobster Sauce174 recipesLobster CroquettesLobster Croquettes99 recipesLobster BallsLobster Balls7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes