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Lobster Soup

A soup made from lobster meat, bread, butter, and milk, seasoned with salt, mace, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 lobster and bread

  1. Boil the lobster and extract all the meat from the shell.

  2. Fry thin slices of bread in butter.

  3. In a marble mortar, alternate pounding the fried bread and lobster meat until it forms a paste.

Make the soup

  1. Melt butter in a stew pan and add the bread and lobster mixture.

  2. Pour in 1 quart of boiling milk and season with salt, mace, and nutmeg.

  3. Let the mixture stew gently for 30 minutes.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 meat that gives the soup its body.
Slices of bread
Pounded into a paste with the lobster, it thickens the soup and gives it a fuller texture.
Butter
Fat that fries the bread and enriches the soup with a rich, rounded flavour.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup and adds creaminess as it stews.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 30 minutes. Milk scorches and can curdle or stick to the pan if it boils hard, so keep the heat low and stir to keep the soup smooth.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, butter, bread, milk, nutmeg. 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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