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Lobster Sauce

A sauce made from lobster stock, meat, and butter, thickened with flour and seasoned with anchovy, cayenne, salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Lobster Sauce

Why it works: Anchovy and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,057 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Lobster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

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

  2. Break the shell and stew it with the legs in 1½ cups of water until reduced.

  3. Strain the mixture and add flour and water to thicken.

Finish the sauce

  1. Pound some of the lobster spawn with a little water and add it to the sauce.

  2. Bring the sauce to a boil and stir in ¼ cup of fresh butter.

  3. Add the lobster meat and season with anchovy, cayenne, salt, and lemon juice.

  4. The sauce should be thick rather than thin.

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.

  1. Anchovy + saucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Lobster + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Supplies the sweet meat and the shell, which flavour the sauce as it stews.
Flour
Thickens the strained liquid into a body-rich sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the finished sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Lobster spawn
Pounded into the sauce to add concentrated shellfish flavour and colour.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce. Flour must be cooked long enough, while the liquid is kept at a steady simmer, to remove its raw taste and reach full thickness. Boiling after adding butter can split the emulsion, so the sauce should be thick but not overheated once the butter is stirred in.

“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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