Skip to main content
Main

Empress Toasts

A toast topped with a smooth mixture of lobster, anchovies, butter, and lemon, seasoned with cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Empress Toasts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the small rounds of bread in hot lard until golden.

  2. Pound the lobster meat with the anchovies, butter, and lemon juice until smooth.

  3. Spread the mixture on the fried bread rounds.

Bake and serve

  1. Sprinkle with cayenne pepper and heat in the oven until hot.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Bread + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

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

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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 flavor and the soft, spreadable body of the topping.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the lobster mixture rich and smooth.
Anchovies
Add savory depth that boosts the seafood flavor without tasting fishy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich lobster and butter.
Bread rounds
Form a crisp base that holds the topping and stays firm under it.

The step that matters

Frying the bread until golden. Bread fried in hot lard browns through the Maillard reaction and dries its surface, so it stays crisp under the moist lobster spread instead of going soggy.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesLobster SauceLobster Sauce174 recipesLobster CroquettesLobster Croquettes99 recipes