Name: Lobster Soup
Ingredients: 1 gallon veal or chicken broth; meat of 6 to 8 large lobsters

Why it works: Meat and lobster work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 909 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Lobster Soup

Ingredients

1 gallon veal or chicken broth
meat of 6 to 8 large lobsters

Directions

Boil the veal or chicken broth.
Cut the lobster meat into small pieces and add it to the broth.
Let the mixture simmer for 10 minutes until thickened.

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.

Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together909 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Veal + meattop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,890 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Veal + lobstertop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together225 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster meat: Provides the main protein and sweet, savory flavor of the soup.
Veal or chicken broth: Forms the liquid base that carries the flavor of the soup.

“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.