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Sauce

Lobster or Crab Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, milk, cream, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and sea salt, served with lobster or crab.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lobster or Crab Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Remove the meat from the boiled lobster or crab and chop the meat.

  2. If using raw lobster, remove the spawn.

  3. Pound the spawn with a little butter.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour.

  3. Gradually add the milk to create a sauce.

  4. Season the sauce with cayenne pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  5. Boil the sauce for a few minutes until it turns bright red.

  6. Add the cream just 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Lobster or crab
Provides the main meat and sweet flavour of the sauce.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the sauce with fat for a smooth texture.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding body and mild sweetness.
Cream
Adds richness and a silkier mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and milk. Flour must be cooked in the melted butter before milk is added gradually, and the sauce kept moving, so it thickens smoothly without lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper. 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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