Skip to main content
Main

Lobster Sauce

A sauce made from lobster, butter, flour, mace, peppercorns, and sweet oil.

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

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lobster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil mace and peppercorns in water until the spice strength is extracted.

  2. Strain the mixture and melt butter in the water, adding flour while stirring.

Add the lobster

  1. Let it boil briefly, then pound the lobster's claw with sweet oil.

  2. Stir the claw into the melted butter.

  3. Chop the lobster meat into small pieces and rub it through a sieve into the butter.

  4. Cut the claw and tail flesh into dice and stir it in.

  5. Bring to a boil again and serve with fresh salmon or boiled fish.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + lobstertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Mace + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Flour + lobstertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Mace + lobstertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together596 recipes

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

Butter
Melts into the liquid to give the sauce richness and a smooth, silky body.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and water into a smooth base for the sauce.
Lobster
Provides the main flavour and the tender pieces of meat that give the sauce its body.

The step that matters

Adding flour while stirring. Flour added to hot butter and water clumps unless it is stirred in steadily, so the sauce stays smooth and thickens evenly.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, lobster. 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.

More lobster sauce recipes

Newburg 3 See all 230 →

You might also like

Lobster CroquettesLobster Croquettes99 recipesLobster BallsLobster Balls7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes