Skip to main content
Main

Lobster Soup, or Bisoue

A veal and lobster broth with meatballs, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lobster Soup, or Bisoue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth and lobster

  1. Boil veal in enough water to cover until meat is reduced to shreds, then strain the broth.

  2. Boil the lobster, extract meat from the body and claws.

  3. Bruise part of the coral and mix with an equal quantity of lobster meat.

Make the meatballs

  1. Add mace, cayenne, salt, and pepper, then form into meatballs using the beaten egg yolk as a binder.

Finish the soup

  1. In 3 quarts of veal broth, add lobster meat cut into pieces and boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Thicken the soup with the remaining coral rubbed through a sieve, then add the meatballs and a little butter rolled in flour.

  3. Simmer gently for 10 minutes without boiling, to preserve color.

  4. Serve with small dice of bread fried brown in butter.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Veal
Breaks down into shreds that give the broth its body and savoury flavour.
Lobster
Provides the main sweet, delicate seafood flavour and tender pieces of meat.
Egg yolk
Binds the seasoned lobster mixture so it holds together as meatballs.
Coral (in the method)
Colours and enriches the soup, and when sieved into the broth it thickens it.
Flour
Thickens the soup when rolled with butter and stirred in.

The step that matters

Simmer gently without boiling. Vigorous boiling can break up the delicate lobster and dull the soup's colour, so the soup should only simmer once thickened.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, lobster, pepper, egg, butter, flour, bread):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lobster, pepper, egg, butter, flour, bread. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLobster SauceLobster Sauce174 recipesLobster CroquettesLobster Croquettes99 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes