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Lobster Soup

A creamy soup made with lobster or crayfish, fish stock, milk, and cornflour, seasoned with lemon, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

  1. If using crayfish, remove all the white meat and boil the shells in the fish stock for 30 minutes, then strain them out.

Make the soup

  1. Thicken the stock with cornflour, then pour in the milk and bring to a boil.

  2. Cut the lobster into small pieces and add to the soup; simmer for 10 minutes.

  3. Flavour with lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve hot in a warm tureen with fried bread.

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. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,889 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lobster + fishtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together326 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main flavour and the tender pieces of seafood in the soup.
Fish stock
Forms the savoury liquid base that carries all the other flavours.
Milk
Adds richness and a creamy body to the soup.
Cornflour
Thickens the stock so the soup has a smooth, body-rich texture.

The step that matters

Thicken the stock with cornflour before adding the milk. Cornflour must be stirred into the liquid and brought to a simmer to swell and thicken it. Adding it unevenly or skipping the heat leaves lumps or a thin soup, and boiling milk too hard can make it scorch or separate.

“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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