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Lobster Pie

A pie of boiled lobster meat and shell broth, thickened with butter and flour, topped with bread crumbs and pastry and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lobster Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Boil the lobsters and remove the tails, cutting them in half and discarding the gut.

  2. Cut each tail into four pieces and place in a small dish with the claw meat.

  3. Pick the meat from the body and add it to the dish, discarding the furry parts and lady spawn.

Make the sauce

  1. In a mortar, beat the shells and set them to stew with water, vinegar, pepper, salt, and mace.

  2. Add butter rolled in flour to the stew and simmer for a few minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture and pour it over the lobster in the dish.

Bake

  1. Sprinkle bread crumbs on top and cover with a thin layer of pastry.

  2. Bake in a slow oven until the pastry is cooked through.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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, which is cooked and then baked in the pie.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, rolled in flour, thickens it as it simmers.
Flour
Coats the butter so it thickens the stewing liquid without clumping.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the rich shellfish flavour.
Bread crumbs
Form a topping layer that helps protect the lobster beneath the pastry.

The step that matters

Bake in a slow oven until the pastry is cooked through. Lobster meat toughens and dries when overcooked, so a gentle oven heats the filling through while the pastry cooks without drying the meat.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, vinegar, pepper, butter, flour, bread):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, vinegar, pepper, butter, flour, bread. 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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