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Lobster Soup

A lobster soup made with boiled lobsters, veal broth, and a mixture of lobster meat, coral, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 470 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Lobster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Boil the lobsters until cooked, then cool and split the tails.

  2. Remove the gills and claws, and cut the meat into bite-sized pieces.

  3. Extract the coral and soft part of the body; bruise some coral in a mortar.

  4. Pick out the meat from the chines and mix with the coral to make forcemeat balls, adding mace, nutmeg, lemon peel, anchovy, cayenne, and egg yolk.

Make the soup

  1. In the veal broth, add the bruised legs and chine; boil for 20 minutes and strain.

  2. To thicken, bruise the live spawn with butter and flour, sieve it, and add to the soup with lobster meat and remaining coral.

  3. Simmer gently for 10 minutes without boiling to maintain color.

  4. Serve in a tureen, adding lemon juice and essence of anchovy.

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

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Anchovy + eggtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Veal + anchovytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together456 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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, which is cut into pieces and added to the soup.
Butter
Enriches the thickening paste with fat and helps it blend smoothly into the broth.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with butter and sieved into the broth.
Egg yolk
Binds the forcemeat balls so they hold together.
Veal broth
Forms the liquid base of the soup, giving it body and savoury depth.

The step that matters

Simmer gently without boiling. Boiling vigorously can toughen the lobster meat and break up the thickened soup, and it can dull the colour. A gentle simmer keeps both the texture and the colour intact.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, veal, butter, flour, lemon, anchovy, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, veal, butter, flour, lemon, anchovy, egg. 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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