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Lobster Cutlets

Lobster cutlets made with chopped lobster, butter, flour, stock, egg, spices, coated in breadcrumbs and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Lobster Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over low heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for a minute.

  3. Gradually add the fish stock or water, stirring until thickened.

  4. Mix in the chopped lobster, egg yolk, cayenne, salt, lemon juice, and lobster butter.

  5. Cook gently until the mixture binds, then transfer to a plate to cool.

Shape and coat

  1. Once cool, form the mixture into neat cutlets.

  2. Coat each cutlet with beaten egg and then with bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the cutlets in deep fat until golden brown.

  2. Serve neatly garnished with fried parsley.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

Cooked lobster
Provides the main flavour and the bulk of the cutlet filling.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the starting roux.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a paste that helps bind the cutlet mixture.
Egg yolk
Enriches the mixture and helps it set and bind when cooked gently.
Egg
Forms a coating that helps the bread crumbs stick and brown when fried.
Bread crumbs
Create a crisp, golden outer crust during deep frying.

The step that matters

Cook gently until the mixture binds. Cooking over too high heat can scramble the egg yolk and make the mixture grainy, while undercooking leaves it too soft to shape. Gentle heat lets the starch and yolk thicken evenly so the cutlets hold their form when fried.

“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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