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Excellent Lobster Soup

A soup made from lobster parts, cream, and forcemeat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Excellent Lobster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Remove the meat from the claws, bodies, and tails of the lobsters.

  2. Discard the brown fur and the bag in the head.

  3. Beat the fins, chine, and small claws in a mortar.

Make the soup

  1. Boil the lobster parts gently in 2 quarts of water with the French roll crumb, white pepper, coarse sea salt, anchovies, onion, sweet herbs, and lemon peel until flavorful.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. In a mortar, beat the spawn with butter, nutmeg, and flour, then mix with 1 quart of cream.

  4. Cut the lobster tails into pieces and boil them with the cream and strained soup.

Add the forcemeat and serve

  1. Prepare forcemeat balls from the remaining lobster, seasoning with mace, pepper, salt, crumbs, and eggs, mixed with a bit of flour.

  2. Heat the forcemeat balls in the soup 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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

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

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

Lobster meat
Provides the main flavor and the tender pieces that give the soup its substance.
Spawn
Its butter-and-nutmeg paste enriches the cream and adds a rich, deep color and flavor.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety body to the soup.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavor and gives the spawn paste a smooth, rich texture.
Eggs
Bind the forcemeat balls so they hold together when heated in the soup.
French roll crumb
Adds body to the broth and helps bind the forcemeat mixture.

The step that matters

Cream and spawn mixture. Cream is rich and can curdle or separate if it boils hard. Keeping the boil gentle once the cream is added keeps the soup smooth and well emulsified.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, lobster, onion, lemon, butter, nutmeg, flour. 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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