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Lobster Sauce for Boiled Fish

A buttery lobster sauce with cayenne, lemon, and flour, served hot over boiled fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lobster Sauce for Boiled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Cut the lobster into small squares.

  2. Pound the lobster with 1 tablespoon of butter.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the remaining butter and stir in the flour to make a drawn butter sauce.

  2. Add the lobster and lemon juice to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lobster + buttertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, 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

Lobster
Supplies the main meat and its sweet, savoury flavour.
Butter
Provides fat for richness, mouthfeel and a buttery flavour in the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter into a smooth, cohesive drawn butter sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and seafood flavours.
Cayenne pepper
Adds a gentle background heat and aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour while the butter is melted. Flour must be stirred evenly into the hot butter so it cooks and thickens smoothly without lumps. Cooking it briefly removes the raw starchy taste and gives the sauce body.

“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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