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Lobster Pie

A savory pie filled with lobster, forcemeat, and stock, topped with puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Lobster Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove the meat from the tail and claws of the lobsters and cut it into slices.

  2. Season the lobster meat with nutmeg, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Make a forcemeat by mixing the soft part of the lobster bodies with grated bread, parsley, minced anchovy, grated lemon peel, mace, salt, pepper, bruised hard-boiled egg yolks, and a bit of butter.

  4. Form the mixture into small balls.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the lobster slices in a pie dish and cover with the forcemeat balls and bruised hard-boiled egg yolks.

  2. Add the rich white stock, white wine, and lemon juice or vinegar.

  3. Cover with puff pastry and bake until the pastry is done.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main meat and sweet, delicate flavour of the pie.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, flaky, golden crust that seals the filling.
Grated bread
Bulks out the forcemeat and helps bind it into soft balls.
Eggs
Bind the forcemeat and add richness to the filling.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the forcemeat, keeping it moist.
White stock
Adds moisture and savoury body that fills the pie as it bakes.

The step that matters

Baking until the pastry is done. Lobster meat overcooks quickly and turns rubbery when heated too long. The pastry needs enough heat to become crisp and golden, so the cook must balance the two by watching the crust rather than relying on a fixed time.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, nutmeg, pepper, bread, parsley, anchovy, lemon. 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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