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Lobster Soup

A soup made from lobster meat, stock, vegetables, herbs, and a French roll crust, seasoned with salt, cayenne, nutmeg, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Lobster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the lobster meat into neat pieces.

  2. Beat the fins and minor claws in a mortar.

Make the soup

  1. In a stew-pan, combine the beaten lobster parts with white stock and sweet herbs.

  2. Add the onion, celery, carrot, and toasted crust of the French roll.

  3. Season with salt and cayenne pepper, then simmer for about 1 hour.

  4. Strain the mixture and return the liquid to the saucepan.

  5. Add the lobster pieces and mix in the beaten coral with flour.

  6. Heat the soup for a few minutes without boiling, then serve hot.

  7. Optionally, boil a strip of lemon rind in the stock and add nutmeg to taste.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  3. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main flavour and tender meat pieces in the finished soup.
Coral
Adds colour and rich lobster flavour when beaten into the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly when mixed with the coral.
French roll crust
Adds body to the broth and helps lightly thicken it as it simmers.
White stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavours of the soup.

The step that matters

Heat without boiling. Once the coral and flour are added, boiling can curdle the egg-free thickening and toughen the lobster meat, so the soup should only be heated gently.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, celery, carrot, pepper, flour, lemon, nutmeg):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, celery, carrot, pepper, flour, lemon, nutmeg. 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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