Skip to main content
Main

Excellent Lobster Soup

A soup of lobster meat, broth, cream, and seasonings, served with lobster pieces and force‑meat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Excellent Lobster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Remove the meat from the claws, bodies, and tails of the lobsters, discarding the brown fur and the bag in the head.

  2. Beat the fins, chine, and small claws in a mortar.

Make the broth

  1. Boil the mixture gently in 2 quarts of water with the French roll crumb, ground white pepper, salt, anchovies, onion, sweet herbs, and lemon peel until flavorful.

  2. Strain the broth.

  3. Beat the lobster spawn with butter, nutmeg, and flour in a mortar.

  4. Mix the beaten lobster spawn with 1 quart of cream.

  5. Cut the lobster tails into pieces.

  6. Boil the lobster pieces with the cream and strained soup.

Make the force-meat balls and serve

  1. Make force-meat balls from the remaining lobster, mace, pepper, salt, crumbs, and eggs.

  2. Mix the force-meat balls with a bit of flour.

  3. Heat the force-meat balls in the soup.

  4. Serve the soup with the force-meat balls.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. White pepper + parsleytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main flavor and the tender meat that makes up the soup's body.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor through the spawn mixture.
French roll crumb
Acts as a thickener, giving the broth more body.
Eggs
Bind the force-meat balls so they hold their shape while cooking.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Boil the lobster pieces with the cream and strained soup. Boiling cream can cause it to curdle or scorch, and overcooked lobster becomes tough and rubbery. Keeping the heat gentle protects both the texture of the soup and the lobster.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, lobster, onion, parsley, lemon, cream, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, lobster, onion, parsley, lemon, cream, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesLobster SauceLobster Sauce174 recipesLobster CroquettesLobster Croquettes99 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipes