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Lobster Pie

A baked lobster pie with a buttery crust, bread crumbs, and a savory lobster filling stewed with vinegar, pepper, salt, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lobster Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the lobster

  1. Boil the lobsters until cooked, then remove the tails and cut them in half.

  2. Remove the gut and cut each tail into four pieces, placing them in a small dish.

  3. Add the meat from the claws and the body, ensuring to remove any furry parts.

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the spawn in a mortar and set the shells to stew with water, vinegar, pepper, salt, and pounded mace.

  2. Add the butter rolled in flour to the stew and boil for a few minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture and pour it over the lobster in the dish.

Bake

  1. Sprinkle bread crumbs on top and cover with pastry.

  2. Bake at 300°F (150°C) until the pastry is cooked through.

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

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

Butter and flour 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

Lobsters
Provide the main meat, which is cooked first and then combined with the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and, rolled in flour, thickens the stew as it boils.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the flavour of the stew.
Pastry
Forms a crust that seals the pie and bakes to a golden, crisp top.

The step that matters

Adding the flour-rolled butter to the stew. Flour needs to boil for a few minutes to cook out its raw taste and thicken the liquid; undercooked flour leaves a pasty texture and floury flavour.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, vinegar, pepper, butter, flour, bread):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, vinegar, pepper, butter, flour, bread. 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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