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Lobster Bisque

A creamy soup made from lobster meat, bones, cream, butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lobster Bisque

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Remove the meat from the lobsters and cut the tender part into small dice.

  2. Put the claw meat and tough parts with the bones into cold water and boil for 15 minutes, adding more water as needed.

Make the soup

  1. Scald the cream in a separate pot.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan, add the flour and mustard, stirring frequently.

  3. When the soup begins to boil, add the onion with cloves, sugar, salt, vinegar, cayenne pepper, and the strained water from the lobster bones.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the tender lobster meat and cook for 10 minutes.

  2. Serve immediately, adding dried coral for color if desired.

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. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Mustard + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,829 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobsters
Provide the main shellfish flavor and the tender meat pieces.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety body to the soup.
Butter
Supplies fat for flavor and forms the base for the flour mixture.
Flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated with the butter.
Vinegar
Adds a little acidity that brightens the rich flavors.

The step that matters

Cooking the tender lobster meat. Lobster meat cooks quickly and becomes tough and rubbery if overcooked, so the 10-minute simmer should be timed carefully once the meat is added.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, cream, butter, flour, mustard, onion, sugar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, cream, butter, flour, mustard, onion, sugar. 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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