Name: Lobster S. Sauce
Ingredients: meat from 3 lobsters; 1 ounce mace; ½ ounce dried cloves; 1 grated nutmeg; handful of salt; grated rind of 1 lemon; 20 anchovies; 1 bottle Madeira

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Lobster S. Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Pound the lobster meat with mace, cloves, nutmeg, salt, lemon rind, and anchovies, then mix and pound all ingredients together with the Madeira.
Shake well and cork tightly.
Use 1-2 teaspoons per quantity of melted butter.
Store in a tightly sealed container.

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.

Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,686 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,557 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,150 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: Provides the main seafood flavor and body of the sauce.
Anchovies: Add savory depth that rounds out the seafood flavor.
Madeira: Adds sweetness and aromatic richness to the mixture.

Swap the lemon

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

Lemonthe original
Figfits about as well
Orangefits about as well
Applefits about as well

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