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Lobster Patties

Lobster patties made with boiled lobster, butter, cream, veal consommé, spices, anchovy essence, lemon juice, flour, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lobster Patties

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove the meat from the tail and claws of the boiled lobster and chop it finely.

Cook

  1. In a stew pan, combine the lobster meat, pounded inside spoon, butter, cream, veal consommé, cayenne pepper, salt, essence of anchovy, lemon juice, flour, and enough water to create a smooth mixture.

  2. Stir and stew the mixture for five minutes.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lobster + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Hen lobster
Provides the main meat and sweet, delicate flavour of the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the filling.
Cream
Adds moisture and body, softening the mixture into a rich filling.
Flour
Thickens the mixture so it holds together rather than running loose.
Veal consommé
Contributes savoury depth and moisture to the filling.

The step that matters

Stirring while stewing. Flour thickens liquid as it heats, but it can clump or scorch if left unstirred. Keeping the mixture moving while it stews gives an even, smooth texture.

“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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