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Sauce

Plain Lobster Sauce

A sauce made from lobster, butter, flour, milk, spawn, lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

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 ↓

Plain Lobster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the flesh from the body and claws of the lobster, and cut it into small pieces.

  2. Boil the broken shell in the milk.

  3. Rub the spawn with ½ tablespoon of butter through a fine sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the remaining butter in a small saucepan.

  2. Mix in the flour smoothly, then add the strained milk.

  3. Stir until it thickens.

  4. Add the spawn and butter, and continue stirring until the flour is well cooked.

  5. Add the lobster, lemon juice, pepper, and salt, and let it boil.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 flavour and the tender pieces of meat in the sauce.
Spawn
Adds colour and a rich, concentrated seafood flavour to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the fat.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as the flour cooks.

The step that matters

Mix in the flour smoothly, then add the strained milk.. Flour clumps if it is not fully mixed into the melted butter first. Smooth mixing lets the starch disperse evenly, so the liquid thickens without lumps.

“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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