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Lobster Soup

A soup made from mutton stock, vegetables, corn flour, milk, anchovy essence, egg yolk, and preserved lobster pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Lobster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Stew the stock with carrot, turnip, onion, celery seed, and peppercorns for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the soup through a sieve.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix corn flour smoothly with milk and add to the soup.

  2. Stir the soup until it boils, then season with pepper and salt.

  3. Add essence of anchovy and stir in the egg yolk.

  4. Add the preserved lobster pieces and let stand for 5-6 minutes before serving.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + corntop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together794 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn flour
Thickens the soup as it boils, giving it body.
Egg yolk
Enriches the soup and adds richness and body when stirred in.
Preserved lobster
Provides the main lobster flavour and substance of the soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens by gentle heat. If the soup is boiling hard when it is added, the yolk can scramble into small curds instead of enriching the soup smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, carrot, turnip, celery, corn, flour, milk):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, carrot, turnip, celery, corn, flour, milk. 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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