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Lobster Patties

A dish of lobster meat mixed with butter, anchovy essence, flour, cream, and veal broth, then cooked until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 470 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Lobster Patties

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Chop the meat of the lobster.

  2. In a mortar, bruise the chopped lobster meat and spoon with butter.

Make the filling

  1. Season with cayenne and essence of anchovy.

  2. Simmer with 1 ounce of butter, 2 teaspoons of flour, and enough cream and veal broth to moisten the mixture.

  3. Cook until the mixture is thicker than lobster sauce.

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. Lobster + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Meat + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together335 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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 meat
Provides the main flavour and the bulk of the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour through the mixture.
Flour
Thickens the mixture as it simmers, giving it body.
Cream
Moistens the mixture and adds smoothness and richness.
Veal broth
Adds savoury depth and liquid to moisten the filling.

The step that matters

Cook until the mixture is thicker than lobster sauce. Flour thickens as it simmers, so the mixture must be cooked long enough for the starch to swell fully. If it stays thin, the filling will be too loose to hold its shape in the patties.

“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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