Skip to main content
Main

Escalloped Lobster

A baked lobster dish with cream, flour, butter, cayenne pepper, and bread crumbs.

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

Why it works: Lobster and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,050 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Escalloped Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the lobster

  1. Remove the lobster from the shell and cut it into small pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the cream, saving enough to blend with the flour.

  2. Once boiling, add the flour and butter, and let it boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Add the lobster and boil for 1 minute, then season with salt and cayenne pepper.

Bake and serve

  1. Butter individual baking dishes and fill them with the lobster mixture.

  2. Sprinkle bread crumbs on top and bake at 400°F (200°C) until slightly brown.

  3. Serve 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. Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Lobster
Forms the main body of the dish and provides its flavour.
Cream
Makes a rich sauce that moistens the lobster and carries the seasoning.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth sauce that holds the lobster together.
Butter
Adds richness to the sauce and helps the surface brown in the oven.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned topping over the creamy lobster.

The step that matters

Thickening the cream with flour. The flour must be blended smoothly with a little cream before it goes in, and the mixture must boil long enough to cook out the raw starch taste. Lumps or undercooked flour leave the sauce grainy or pasty.

“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 recipesLobster SauceLobster Sauce174 recipesLobster CroquettesLobster Croquettes99 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes