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Lobster Soup

A soup made with lobster, rice, and a broth of stock, wine, and sautéed ham, onion, carrot, parsley, and thyme.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Lobster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a pan, fry the ham, onion, carrot, parsley, and thyme in butter until softened.

  2. In a large pot, combine the white stock, white wine, and chopped lobster.

  3. Add the fried mixture to the pot and simmer for 1 hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the soup, then stir in the sliced hard-boiled egg, butter, and boiled rice.

  2. Heat the soup until very hot and serve with toast.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main seafood flavor and tender pieces of meat in the soup.
White stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavors and makes up most of the soup.
White wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the broth as it simmers.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Boiled rice
Thickens the soup slightly and adds body to the broth.

The step that matters

Simmer the lobster-stock mixture gently for 1 hour. Simmering extracts flavor from the lobster and vegetables; boiling hard can toughen the lobster meat and cloud the broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, carrot, parsley, thyme, butter, white wine, lobster):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Parsnipfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, carrot, parsley, thyme, butter, white wine, lobster. 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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