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Lobster Soup

A soup made from mutton stock, vegetables, corn flour, milk, anchovy essence, egg yolk, and preserved lobster.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Lobster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Stew the mutton stock with carrot, turnip, onion, celery seed, and peppercorns for 1 hour.

  2. Rub the soup through a sieve.

  3. Mix corn flour smoothly with milk and add to the soup.

  4. Stir the soup until it boils.

Season and finish

  1. Season the soup with pepper and salt.

  2. Add essence of anchovy.

  3. Break the egg yolk into the soup tureen.

  4. Stir the soup.

  5. Add the preserved lobster cut into pieces.

  6. Let it stand for 5-6 minutes before serving.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + corntop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together794 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton stock
Forms the savoury liquid base that carries all the other flavours.
Corn flour
Thickens the soup as it heats, giving it body.
Milk
Adds richness and a creamy, mellow texture.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the soup, adding smoothness and body.
Preserved lobster
Provides the main lobster flavour and tender pieces of seafood.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens when heated but can scramble into specks if the soup is boiling. Stirring it in gently off the heat, as the soup is served, keeps the texture smooth and silky.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, carrot, turnip, celery, corn, flour, milk):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, carrot, turnip, celery, corn, flour, milk. 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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