Name: Pot Lobsters, As At Wood’s Hotel
Ingredients: lobster meat; mace; nutmeg; white pepper; coarse sea salt; cloves; butter; bay leaves

Why it works: Nutmeg and clove 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 ↓

Pot Lobsters, As At Wood’s Hotel

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the lobster meat in whole pieces and split the tail, removing the gut.
If the inside is not watery, add it to the meat.
Season the lobster with mace, nutmeg, white pepper, salt, and finely powdered cloves.
Place a little butter at the bottom of a pan and lay the lobster on top with bay leaves in between.
Cover the lobster with more butter and bake gently.
Once done, pour the contents onto a sieve and use a fork to place the pieces into pots, adding seasoning.
When cold, pour clarified butter over the lobster, but do not use hot butter.

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.

Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,686 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,557 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,695 recipes

Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).
Nutmeg + white peppertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,375 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, meat, mace, nutmeg, clove, butter):

Cinnamonfits better
Allspicefits better
Thymefits better
White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, meat, mace, nutmeg, clove, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.