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Curried Lobster

A lobster dish simmered with ham, curry powder, and cream, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Curried Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Place the ham slice in a shallow saucepan.

  2. Add the lobster meat, Cayenne pepper, and salt.

  3. Mix the white soup and cream. Pour the mixture over the lobster mixture.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Simmer on low heat for about 1 hour.

  2. In a small bowl, mix the curry powder and flour with a little liquid from the pot until smooth. Add the mixture to the saucepan. Cook for 3 more minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with a rim of well-boiled rice or separately.

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

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

  3. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Meat + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

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

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 protein and sweet flavour of the dish.
White soup
Forms the creamy base that carries the lobster and seasonings.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid so the sauce becomes smooth and cohesive.
Curry powder
Supplies the warm, aromatic spice flavour that defines the dish.

The step that matters

Mixing the curry powder and flour into liquid. Dry flour clumps when added straight to hot liquid, so it must be blended smooth with some cooking liquid first. Stirring it into a small amount of liquid before adding it to the pot lets the starch disperse evenly and thicken the sauce without lumps.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, meat, ham, pepper, cream, flour, rice):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, meat, ham, pepper, cream, flour, rice. 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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