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Lobster Soup

A soup made from boiled lobsters, water, flour, butter, lemon juice, anchovy essence, and lobster forcemeat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lobster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Extract the meat from the shells of the lobsters and set the spawn aside.

  2. Beat the fins and small claws in a mortar.

  3. Place the beaten fins and small claws in a saucepan with water to draw out the flavor.

  4. Strain the liquid and return it to the saucepan.

Finish the soup

  1. Beat the spawn with flour and butter in a mortar.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve into the strained soup.

  3. Simmer the soup without boiling for 10 minutes to preserve the color.

  4. Squeeze in lemon juice.

  5. Add a little essence of anchovies.

Serve

  1. Serve with forcemeat-balls made from minced lobster and other ingredients.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Hen lobsters
Provide the main flavor and meat for the soup.
Spawn
, enriches the soup's color and richness when rubbed into the broth.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly when combined with the spawn and butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping carry flavor through the soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the soup.

The step that matters

Simmer without boiling. Boiling can break down the colour and make the soup cloudy or tough, so it should only simmer gently for the stated 10 minutes to preserve its colour.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, flour, butter, lemon, egg, 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.

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