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Sauce

Lobster Sauce for Fish

A sauce made from lobster spawn, meat, butter, water, and seasonings, used for fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spawn

  1. Remove the spawn from the live lobsters.

  2. Bruise the spawn in a mortar, then add a little cold water.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve and set the strained liquid aside until needed.

Prepare the lobster

  1. Boil the lobsters until three-quarters cooked.

  2. Pick the meat from the lobsters and cut it into small pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the lobster meat, butter, water, and enough spawn liquor to color the sauce in a stewpan.

  2. Heat the mixture over a fire.

  3. Add flour and water to thicken the sauce, stirring until the sauce boils.

  4. Season with anchovy liquor, lemon juice, and Cayenne pepper.

  5. Let the sauce simmer for five minutes, skimming off any foam that forms.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Anchovy + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 and flavor of the sauce.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Spawn
Gives the sauce its characteristic color and rich lobster flavor.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the lobster pieces.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and water while stirring. Flour must be stirred in evenly and the sauce brought to a boil so the starch fully swells and thickens. Adding it in one lump or skipping the stirring can leave lumps or a raw, pasty taste.

“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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