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Potted Lobster

A preserved lobster made by boiling, seasoning, and encasing the meat in a butter glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Potted Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the lobster

  1. Boil the lobsters in salted water until half cooked.

  2. Remove the meat and spawn from the shells and place them in a stew pan.

  3. Add mace, cloves, nutmeg, pepper, salt, lemon juice, essence of ham, and anchovy liquor.

  4. Simmer over low heat for 10 minutes.

Make the mixture

  1. Pound the meat in a mortar.

  2. Reduce the cooking liquid to a glaze and mix it with the pounded meat and butter.

  3. Press the mixture into small flat preserving pots.

Pot and store

  1. Cover with clarified butter and let cool.

  2. Seal with white paper and store in a dry place.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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 gives the potted dish its body and flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the set mixture a smooth texture.
Anchovy liquor
Adds savoury depth, deepening the seafood flavour of the mixture.
Essence of ham
Adds a smoky, savoury meatiness that rounds out the lobster flavour.

The step that matters

Reduce the cooking liquid to a glaze. Reducing concentrates the flavour of the liquid so it seasons the pounded meat strongly rather than diluting it. Adding it too wet would make the potted mixture loose and hard to set.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, clove, nutmeg, pepper, lemon, ham, anchovy):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, clove, nutmeg, pepper, lemon, ham, anchovy. 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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