Skip to main content
Main

To Pot Lobsters

A lobster dish simmered in butter with mace, white pepper, nutmeg, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Prepare the lobster

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

  2. Cut the lobster meat into small bits.

  3. Season the bits with mace, white pepper, nutmeg, and coarse sea salt.

Bake

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

  2. Bake for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the spawn when cold.

  2. Mix some of the butter with the spawn.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Cover the pots with the colored 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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lobster + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster meat
Forms the main body and flavour of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and coats the surface as it bakes.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour that complements the seafood.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, slightly sweet aromatic notes.

The step that matters

Add the spawn when cold. Roe is delicate and can overcook, turn grainy, or lose its texture when exposed to heat. Adding it once the mixture has cooled keeps it soft and intact.

Swap the white pepper

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

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

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

Lobster SauceLobster Sauce174 recipesLobster CroquettesLobster Croquettes99 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipes