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Lobster Sauce

A sauce of lobster meat, butter, anchovy sauce, salt, cayenne, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Lobster Sauce

Why it works: Lobster and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 470 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Lobster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Remove the meat from the lobster shell and cut it into small squares; set aside.

  2. Pound the spawn from under the tail smooth with 1 tablespoon of butter, then rub through a sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt 1 cup of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the anchovy sauce, salt, cayenne, pounded mace, and the sifted spawn to the melted butter; mix well.

  3. Add the lobster meat and heat until just before boiling, but do not let it boil to preserve the color.

Serve

  1. Serve with turbot or salmon.

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

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Meat + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together335 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

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

  5. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster meat
Provides the main seafood flavour and tender pieces that sit in the warm sauce.
Butter
Forms the rich, fatty base that carries the sauce and gives it a smooth texture.
Lobster spawn
Adds colour and a concentrated lobster flavour, thickening the sauce slightly as it is blended.
Anchovy sauce
Adds savoury depth and saltiness that rounds out the seafood flavour.

The step that matters

Heating the lobster meat. Heating the sauce just below boiling keeps the butter emulsified and the lobster meat tender and pale. Boiling can split the butter fat and toughen the seafood, dulling the colour.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, lobster, butter, anchovy. 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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