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Boiled Lobster

A boiled lobster served with butter, parsley, and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the water

  1. Fill a pot with enough water to cover the lobster and add 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt for each quart of water.

  2. Bring the water to a rolling boil.

Cook the lobster

  1. Carefully add the lobster head first to the boiling water to kill it instantly.

  2. Boil the lobster hard for 20 minutes or longer, depending on its weight.

  3. Remove the lobster from the water using tongs and wipe off any scum.

  4. Rub butter over the lobster with a linen cloth.

Serve

  1. Remove the large claws and crack them at each joint.

  2. Place the lobster in a long dish, arrange the claws along the side, and garnish with sprigs of parsley.

  3. Serve with drawn butter and slices of lemon.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

  4. Lobster + buttertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

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

  5. Lobster + parsleytop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together890 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Is the main dish, cooked whole in boiling salted water until its flesh turns opaque and firm.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water so the lobster meat takes on some flavour as it boils.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded flavour to the lobster shell and meat when rubbed on.

The step that matters

Boil the lobster hard for the right time. Overcooking makes lobster meat tough and rubbery, while undercooking leaves it unsafe. Timing should follow the lobster's weight, since larger animals need longer to cook through.

“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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