Skip to main content
Main

Lobster Pie

A baked pie with boiled lobster, a savory stew of shells, and a pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lobster Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Boil the lobsters, then remove the tails and cut them in half.

  2. Remove the gut and cut each tail into four pieces.

  3. Place the tail pieces in a small dish along with the meat from the claws and body.

  4. Pick off any furry parts and remove the lady and spawn from the body.

Make the sauce

  1. In a mortar, beat the spawn and shells, then stew them with water, vinegar, pepper, salt, and mace.

  2. Add butter rolled in flour to the stew and boil for a few minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture and pour it over the lobster in the dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Sprinkle bread crumbs on top and cover with pastry.

  2. Bake in a slow oven 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 set in the pie and cooked through during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and with flour thickens the stew into a sauce.
Flour
Combined with butter, it thickens the stewed liquor so it coats the lobster.
Bread crumbs
Form a topping layer that adds texture and helps soak up the sauce beneath the pastry.

The step that matters

Adding butter rolled in flour to the stew. Flour needs to boil for a few minutes to cook out its raw taste and to thicken the liquid properly. Adding it without enough boiling leaves the sauce pasty or thin.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, vinegar, pepper, butter, flour, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, vinegar, pepper, butter, flour, bread. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLobster SauceLobster Sauce174 recipesLobster CroquettesLobster Croquettes99 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes