Name: Lobster Sauce
Ingredients: 1 good-sized boiled lobster; 1 quart water; 2 tablespoons lemon juice; a dash of cayenne; dried lobster coral (powdered)

Why it works: Lobster and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,100 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Lobster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Remove the meat from the boiled lobster.
Boil the shells in 1 quart of water for 20 minutes.
Strain the broth and use it to make a cream sauce.
Cut the lobster meat into small pieces and powder the dried lobster coral.

Finish the sauce

Stir both the lobster meat and coral into the sauce.
Add a dash of cayenne and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice.

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.

Lobster + lemontop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,100 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

Boiled lobster: Supplies the main meat that gives the sauce its substance and flavor.
Water: Extracts flavor from the shells to make the broth that forms the sauce base.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich, buttery flavor of the sauce.
Dried lobster coral: Adds concentrated lobster flavor and a rich color to the sauce.

“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.