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To Boil Lobsters

A recipe for boiling lobsters in salted water, then serving with parsley garnish and remoulade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,095 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

To Boil Lobsters

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the lobster

  1. Bring 1 gallon of water to a fast boil and add 5 oz of coarse sea salt.

  2. Add the lobster to the boiling water.

  3. Cook a moderate-sized lobster for 15 to 25 minutes and a large lobster for 30 to 40 minutes.

Prepare and serve

  1. Remove the large claws and crack the shells at the joints.

  2. Separate the tail from the body and split it down the middle.

  3. Arrange the lobster neatly on a serving dish and garnish with curled parsley.

  4. Serve with remoulade or your preferred sauce.

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 + saucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Parsley + saucetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,693 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. 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
Its firm meat becomes tender and opaque when cooked through in boiling water.
Coarse sea salt
Salts the cooking water so the lobster meat is lightly seasoned as it cooks.

The step that matters

Timing the boil by lobster size. Overcooking toughens lobster meat, while undercooking leaves it translucent near the shell. Cooking time depends on size, so the moderate and large lobsters need separate timings.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, sauce. 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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