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Lobster Sauce

A sauce made from lobster meat, butter, and seasonings, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Lobster Sauce

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Pick the meat from the lobster and cut the lobster meat into small pieces.

  2. Break the shell.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the shell and legs in 1½ cups of water until reduced.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add flour and water to thicken.

  4. Pound some of the live spawn from the tail with a little water.

  5. Add the spawn to the sauce.

  6. Let the sauce boil.

  7. Add ¾ pound of butter and the lobster meat.

  8. Season with anchovy, cayenne, salt, and lemon juice to taste.

  9. Add ½ cup of white wine or 1 cup of cream for a richer sauce.

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.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lobster + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Lobster
Supplies the sweet meat and the shell and spawn that flavour the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, glossy body.
Flour
Thickens the strained liquid so the sauce holds together.
White wine or cream
Optional addition that makes the sauce richer and rounder.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and lobster meat. Butter emulsifies into a hot, thickened liquid to form a smooth sauce; if the sauce is boiling too hard or too cool, the butter can separate and look greasy.

“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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