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Small Lobster Pies

Small pies filled with lobster meat and gravy, topped with puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,814 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Small Lobster Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Boil the lobsters, then let them cool and pick out all the meat.

  2. Bruise the shells and spoon in a mortar, then stew with water, vinegar, pepper, salt, and butter for 30 minutes.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare small raised pie forms and fill them with the lobster meat.

  2. Strain the gravy and pour it over the lobster meat in the forms.

  3. Cover with thin puff pastry and bake for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold.

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

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

  2. Lobster + buttertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Vinegar + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Lobster + vinegartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together692 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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 that forms the body of each pie.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour into the gravy.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, golden crust that encloses the filling while baking.

The step that matters

Stewing the shells in the gravy. Bruising the shells and stewing them for the full 30 minutes extracts flavour and body into the liquid. Too short a stew yields a weak, thin gravy that does little for the filling.

“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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