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Creamed Lobster

Creamed lobster is a sauce of butter, flour, cream, and lobster pieces, seasoned with cayenne, salt, and lemon juice.

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

Creamed Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Season the lobster with cayenne and a little more than half the salt.

  2. Melt the butter in a double boiler over low heat.

  3. Add the flour to the melted butter and stir until smooth and frothy.

  4. Gradually stir in the cream and bring the sauce to a boil.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the lobster to the sauce and place hot water in the lower pan of the double boiler.

  2. Cover and cook for 10 minutes, stirring frequently.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice and serve immediately.

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. Cream + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Cream
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and gives it a rich, smooth body.
Lobster
Supplies the main protein and flavour of the dish.
Butter
Provides fat and flavour, and carries the flour to form the roux base.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the richness of the cream and lobster.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the cream. Adding cream slowly to the butter and flour mixture keeps it smooth, since lumps form when liquid is poured in too fast. Bringing the sauce to a boil then thickens it through starch gelatinisation.

“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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