Name: Baked Lobster
Ingredients: 4 tablespoons butter; 2 cans lobster, flaked; 3 hard-boiled eggs, sieved; grated rind of 2 lemons; juice of 2 lemons; 2 cups bread crumbs; 4 tablespoons cream; Nokomis salt to taste; Blue Bird pepper to taste

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 ↓

Baked Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the filling

Melt the butter in a pan.
Add the flaked lobster meat, sieved eggs, lemon rind, lemon juice, and bread crumbs. Mix well.
Transfer the mixture to a buttered baking dish.

Bake and serve

Pour the cream over the top and sprinkle with additional bread crumbs.
Bake for 20 minutes and serve very hot.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,050 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, 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 body and flavor of the dish.
Eggs: Bind the mixture and add richness and body as they set.
Bread crumbs: Absorb moisture and give the filling structure and a crisp topping.
Cream: Adds moisture and richness, keeping the top tender while it bakes.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, helping the mixture brown lightly.

“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.