Skip to main content
Main

Lobster Patties

A baked pastry dish with boiled lobster, gravy, breadcrumbs, butter, pepper, salt, lemon juice, and puff pastry.

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

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 Patties

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the filling

  1. Mash the small claws and spawn in a dish until smooth.

  2. Add gravy and bread crumbs.

  3. Heat over the fire until boiling.

  4. Strain the mixture to a creamy thickness.

  5. Mix half of the mixture with the lobster.

  6. Add butter, pepper, salt, and lemon juice to the lobster mixture.

  7. Warm until butter melts.

  8. Let the mixture cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a patty pan or dish with puff pastry.

  2. Fill with the lobster mixture.

  3. Cover with more pastry.

  4. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 45 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Cut the top pastry.

  2. Warm the reserved sauce with a little butter.

  3. Pour the sauce over the patty.

  4. Garnish with squeezed lemon.

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

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Lobster + buttertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main meaty filling and the characteristic flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the filling and sauce.
Gravy
Adds moisture and savory depth, helping bind the claw and spawn mixture.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the mixture and help it hold its creamy body.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, crisp, golden casing around the filling as it bakes.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich lobster and butter flavors.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before filling the pastry. A hot filling melts the butter in the raw pastry before it sets, making it greasy and soggy and causing the layers to slump instead of puffing up in the oven.

“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 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesLobster SauceLobster Sauce174 recipesLobster CroquettesLobster Croquettes99 recipes