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Curried Lobster

A lobster dish simmered with ham, curry, and spices, served over rice.

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

Curried Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and simmer

  1. Place the lobster meat in a shallow saucepan with the ham, Cayenne pepper, and salt.

  2. Mix the white soap and cream, then pour over the lobster meat.

  3. Simmer on low heat for about 1 hour.

Thicken and serve

  1. Add the curry powder and flour mixed with a little of the cooking liquid.

  2. Cook for an additional 3 minutes until ready to serve.

  3. Serve with well-boiled rice on the side or around the dish.

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. Pepper + lemontop 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. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Meat + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 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 meat
Forms the main body of the dish and gives it a tender, savoury texture.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, rounding out the curry flavour.
Curry powder
Provides the dominant spiced aroma and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce as it heats.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and curry powder. Flour should be mixed with some of the hot cooking liquid before it goes in, so the starch disperses evenly. Stirred in dry, it forms lumps that stay in the sauce. The starch then thickens as it heats, so the sauce must simmer long enough to lose its raw flour taste.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, meat, ham, pepper, cream, flour, rice):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, meat, ham, pepper, cream, flour, rice. 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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