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Creamed Lobster

Creamed lobster is a lobster dish cooked with milk, cream, butter, flour, lemon, salt, and cayenne pepper.

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 ↓

Creamed Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, melt the butter and whisk in the flour to form a roux.

  2. Gradually add the milk and half of the cream, stirring until smooth.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the chopped lobster, salt, and cayenne, stirring until heated through.

  2. Stir in the remaining cream and heat just until warm.

  3. Squeeze in the lemon juice and serve immediately.

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. Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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
Provides the main protein and flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and forms the base of the roux.
Flour
Thickens the milk and cream into a smooth sauce as a roux.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it a creamy body.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream sauce.

The step that matters

Heat just until warm after adding the remaining cream. Cream-based sauces can curdle or separate when overheated, so the final cream should only be warmed gently to keep the sauce smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, milk, cream, butter, flour, 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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