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To Pot Lobsters

A lobster dish cooked with butter, mace, white pepper, nutmeg, salt, bay leaves, and optional cayenne pepper.

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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the lobster

  1. Half-boil the lobsters and remove the meat.

  2. Cut the meat into small pieces and season with mace, white pepper, nutmeg, and salt.

Bake and set

  1. Press the mixture into a pot and cover with butter.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  3. When cool, transfer the lobster to pots with some of the butter.

Finish with butter

  1. Beat the remaining butter with some of the lobster spawn and mix to cover the pots.

  2. Strain the mixture and pour over the lobster in the pots.

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. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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 that forms the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and coating the lobster to keep it moist.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the lobster meat.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic note that complements the lobster.

The step that matters

Half-boiling the lobsters. Boiling only partly cooks the lobster, so the meat stays tender when it is baked later. Overcooking at this stage makes the meat tough and dry once it goes into the oven.

Swap the white pepper

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

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

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