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Lobster Sauce

A sauce made from lobster meat, butter, flour, cayenne pepper, lemon juice, and simmered water.

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

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

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the lobster

  1. Reserve ½ cup of tender bits of lobster meat.

  2. Cut the remaining lobster meat finely and simmer in 1 pint of hot water for 1 hour.

  3. Pound the lobster with 1 tablespoon of butter to make a paste.

Make the sauce

  1. Cook 1½ tablespoons of flour in 2 tablespoons of butter until smooth.

  2. Strain the mixture and add the simmered water, cayenne pepper, lemon juice, reserved lobster meat, and butter.

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

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

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

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

  5. Meat + buttertop 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

Lobster meat
Supplies the main flavor, both in the pounded paste and the reserved pieces added at the end.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked in butter until smooth.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor through the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich lobster flavor.

The step that matters

Cook the flour in butter until smooth. Cooking flour in fat until smooth thickens the sauce evenly and cooks off the raw starchy taste. Rushing this step can leave lumps or a floury flavor.

“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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