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To Pot Lobsters

Lobsters cooked in butter with mace, nutmeg, white pepper, salt, bay leaves, and clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

To Pot Lobsters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Half boil the lobsters and remove the meat in large pieces.

  2. Split the tails and remove the gut; add the inside if not watery.

  3. Season the meat with mace, nutmeg, white pepper, salt, and finely powdered cloves.

Bake and pot

  1. Place a little butter at the bottom of a pan and lay the lobster on top with bay leaves in between.

  2. Cover the lobster with butter and bake gently for half an hour.

  3. Pour the contents onto a sieve and arrange the pieces in potting pots with seasoning.

  4. When cold, pour clarified butter over the lobster, ensuring it is not hot.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. White pepper + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lobsters
Provides the main meat that forms the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the lobster tender during gentle baking.
Clarified butter
Forms a sealing layer over the potted lobster, adding richness and helping preserve it.

The step that matters

Baking gently with butter. High heat toughens lobster protein and squeezes out moisture, so a gentle bake in butter keeps the meat tender and juicy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, mace, nutmeg, butter):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, mace, nutmeg, butter. 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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