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Lobster Farcie

A lobster dish where meat is mixed with cream sauce, seasoned, stuffed back into shells, topped with breadcrumbs, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Lobster Farcie

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 filling

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

  2. Stir the lobster meat into a thick cream sauce.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt, red pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and a small quantity of onion juice.

Bake and serve

  1. Return the mixture to the shells and sprinkle thickly with bread crumbs.

  2. Brown in the oven at 300°F (150°C) until golden.

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. Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

  3. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main meat and sweet flavor of the filling.
Thick cream sauce
Binds the lobster pieces and keeps the filling moist.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust when browned in the oven.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savory, tangy depth that seasons the cream filling.

The step that matters

Brown in the oven until golden. Browning depends on surface heat reaching the bread crumbs, which turn golden through Maillard reactions. Pulling the dish too early leaves the crumbs pale, while over-browning can scorch them before the filling is heated through.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, cream, sauce, pepper, 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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