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A Good Receipt to Pot Lobsters

A lobster dish cooked in butter with mace, nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

A Good Receipt to Pot Lobsters

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 lobster

  1. Cook the lobsters and let them cool.

  2. Remove all the meat from the tails and claws, discarding the black gut and tails.

  3. In a bowl, mix the lobster meat with mace, nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and salt.

Layer and bake

  1. In a deep earthen pot, layer 1 pound of butter at the bottom.

  2. Add the lobster mixture and cover with the remaining butter.

  3. Tie a paper over the pot and place it in a 300°F (150°C) oven for several hours.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobsters
Provide the main meat that forms the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and seals the lobster from drying out during slow baking.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour that complements the lobster.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic sweetness that rounds out the spices.

The step that matters

Tie a paper over the pot and bake low for several hours. A low oven and a tight seal let the lobster cook gently in the butter, keeping it moist and tender. Higher heat or an uncovered pot would dry out and toughen the delicate meat.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, nutmeg, clove, pepper, butter):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, nutmeg, clove, pepper, butter. 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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