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Lobster Souffle

A baked lobster custard made with butter, flour, milk, eggs, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Lobster Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour and gradually add the milk.

  3. Add the lobster, salt, paprika, onion juice, and the beaten yolks of the eggs.

  4. Cook for five minutes after adding the yolks, then remove from heat and let cool.

Bake and serve

  1. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered pan and bake in a water bath at 400°F (200°C) until firm.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the base and whites, beaten stiff, lift the soufflé as it bakes.
Flour
Forms a roux with the butter that thickens the milk into a stable base.
Milk
Liquid that, with the flour, becomes the creamy body of the soufflé.
Lobster meat
Main flavour and protein, finely chopped so it blends evenly into the base.
Butter
Fat that enriches the roux and helps the soufflé release from the pan.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air in the whites; stirring or overmixing deflates the foam, so the soufflé bakes flat and dense instead of rising.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, lobster, meat, flour, milk, egg):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lobster, meat, flour, milk, egg. 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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