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Dressed Lobster

A lobster stuffed with minced meat, anchovy, bread, spices, and butter, then browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 470 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Dressed Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove the meat from the lobster and mince it finely with the anchovy.

  2. Mix the minced meat with grated bread, salt, cayenne pepper, and Indian pickle vinegar.

  3. Moisten the mixture with melted butter and heat it thoroughly.

Fill and brown

  1. Split the lobster tail and fill it, as well as the body shell, with the mixture.

  2. Brown the filled lobster using a salamander.

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. Lobster + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Anchovy + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,260 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  4. Meat + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together335 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Anchovy + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 of the filling and gives it its flavour.
Anchovy
Adds savoury depth to the minced lobster filling.
Grated bread
Absorbs liquid and gives the filling a soft, crumbly body.
Melted butter
Moistens the filling and adds richness and flavour.
Indian pickle vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich lobster and butter.

The step that matters

Heating the moistened filling thoroughly. The lobster meat must be fully heated before it goes into the shell, because the shell is then only browned under the salamander and the filling needs to be cooked through first.

“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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