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Excellent Lobster Soup

A soup made from lobster parts, water, French roll crumb, anchovies, onion, herbs, lemon peel, cream, and butter, served with lobster forcemeat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 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 soup

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

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. In a mortar, beat the spawn with a bit of butter, nutmeg, and flour, then mix with 1 quart of cream.

  4. Cut the lobster tails into pieces and boil them with the cream and strained soup.

Serve

  1. Serve with forcemeat balls made from the remaining lobster, seasoned with mace, pepper, salt, crumbs, and 1-2 eggs, rolled in flour and heated in the soup.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 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. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Lobsters
Provide the main meat and the shell parts that build the flavour of the soup.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the soup.
Eggs
Bind the forcemeat balls so they hold their shape while heating in the soup.
Flour
Thickens the spawn mixture and helps the forcemeat balls hold together.
Onion
Adds savoury depth to the broth as it simmers with the lobster.

The step that matters

Boil the lobster parts gently. Boiling hard can toughen the lobster and cloud the broth. A gentle simmer extracts flavour from the shells and parts while keeping the meat tender and the soup clear.

Swap the white pepper

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, onion, lemon, cream, nutmeg, flour, 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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