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Curried Lobster

A lobster dish simmered in butter, curry powder, and flour with water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Curried Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the meat from the lobster shell and chop it coarsely.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the lobster meat with a little coarse sea salt, black pepper, butter, Indian curry powder, and flour mixed with a little cold water.

  3. Add ½ cup of cold water and let it stew for about 10 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Lobster + buttertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Forms the main body of the dish and provides the sweet, tender protein that stews.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying the curry flavour and giving a smoother mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce as it stews.
Indian curry powder
Supplies the aromatic spice flavour that defines the dish.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and water mixture. Flour must be mixed smoothly with cold water before it goes into the pan; added dry or lumpy, it forms clumps instead of thickening the sauce evenly. Cold water keeps the starch from clumping until it is dispersed.

“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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