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Buttered Lobster

A lobster dish where boiled lobster meat is mixed with a butter, anchovy, and egg yolk sauce and served on a lobster body.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 470 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Buttered Lobster

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Cut one lobster body down the middle and remove the meat from the other lobster shells.

  2. Mince the lobster meat and place it in a saucepan.

Make the sauce

  1. Add white wine, vinegar, nutmeg, salt, and pepper to the saucepan and bring to a boil.

  2. Melt the butter with the anchovy and egg yolks in a separate bowl.

  3. Mix the lobster meat with the melted butter mixture, stirring until hot.

Serve

  1. Place the lobster body in the center of a dish and surround it with the minced lobster.

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. Lobster + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. White wine + buttertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Anchovy + eggtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobsters
Provide the main meat that forms the dish's body.
Egg yolks
Emulsify the melted butter, giving the sauce a rich, smooth body.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, carrying the flavor of the dish.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma as the lobster simmers in the saucepan.
Anchovy
Adds savory depth to the butter sauce without a clearly fishy taste.

The step that matters

Mixing the melted butter with the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken and emulsify butter only when handled gently. If the mixture gets too hot or is stirred too vigorously, it can scramble or separate, leaving the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, white wine, vinegar, pepper, butter, anchovy, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, white wine, vinegar, pepper, butter, anchovy, 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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