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Lobster Soup

A soup made with veal knuckle, lobster meat, and seasoned with mace, nutmeg, cayenne, lemon peel, and thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Lobster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Boil the knuckle of veal in enough water to cover it until the meat is tender and falls apart.

  2. Strain the broth well.

  3. Boil the lobsters, then extract all the meat from the body and claws.

Make the force-meat balls

  1. Bruise part of the coral in a mortar and mix it with an equal amount of lobster meat.

  2. Add mace, nutmeg, cayenne, and grated lemon peel.

  3. Form the mixture into force-meat balls using the beaten egg yolk as a binder.

Make the soup and serve

  1. In a pot, combine 3 quarts of the veal broth with the lobster meat cut into bite-sized pieces and boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Thicken the soup with the remaining coral rubbed through a sieve.

  3. Add the force-meat balls to the soup.

  4. Add a little butter rolled in flour.

  5. Simmer gently for 10 minutes without boiling.

  6. Pour the soup into a tureen 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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Lobsters
Provide the main flavour and the tender meat for the soup and force-meat balls.
Veal
Its knuckle gives a rich, gelatinous broth that forms the soup base.
Egg yolk
Binds the force-meat mixture so the balls hold their shape during cooking.
Butter
Enriches the soup with fat and, with flour, thickens it to a smoother body.
Flour
Combined with butter, it forms a roux-style paste that thickens the soup.
Lobster coral
Rubbed through a sieve, it colours and thickens the soup and adds rich flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer gently without boiling. Boiling vigorously can toughen the lobster meat and force-meat balls, and can break the egg-bound balls apart, so the soup should only simmer.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, lobster, nutmeg, lemon, egg, butter, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lobster, nutmeg, lemon, egg, butter, flour. 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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