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Lobster or Crab Sauce

A buttery, creamy sauce flavored with lemon, cayenne, and sea salt, served over lobster or crab.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 or Crab Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the meat from the boiled lobster or crab and chop it.

  2. If using raw lobster, remove the spawn.

  3. Pound the spawn with a little butter.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour to make a roux.

  3. Gradually add the milk, stirring constantly until smooth.

  4. Season the sauce with cayenne pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  5. Add the spawn to the sauce after the lobster.

  6. Simmer the sauce for a few minutes until it turns bright red.

  7. Add the cream just before serving.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour as the base of the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce with the butter as a roux.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.
Lobster or crab
Provides the main shellfish meat and flavour of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the milk while stirring constantly. Adding liquid slowly to a roux and stirring keeps the flour dispersed, so the sauce becomes smooth instead of lumpy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper. 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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