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Sauce

Lobster Sauce

A sauce made with butter, flour, lobster coral, water, cayenne pepper, salt, clams, and lobster.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Lobster Sauce

Why it works: Butter and clam work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 840 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Lobster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the meat of the clams and the tail of the boiled lobster into small dice.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat until it begins to bubble.

  2. Stir in the flour and mix for a few moments.

  3. Add the lobster coral, boiling water, cayenne pepper, salt, and lobster dice.

  4. Stir until the mixture is perfectly smooth and just about to boil, then remove from heat.

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. Butter + clamtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together840 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Meat + clamtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lobster + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

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

  5. Butter + meattop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Butter
Forms the fat base that carries flavour and gives the sauce a rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Cooked with the butter, it thickens the liquid into a smooth, body-rich sauce.
Lobster coral
Adds concentrated shellfish flavour and a deeper colour to the sauce.
Lobster tail
Supplies the main shellfish flavour and tender pieces of meat to the sauce.
Clam meat
Adds more sea flavour and soft texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter and then adding liquid. Stirring the flour into melted butter cooks out its raw taste and lets it disperse evenly. Adding the boiling water while stirring keeps the starch from clumping, so the sauce stays smooth as it thickens.

“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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