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Lobster Soup

A soup made from boiled lobsters, parsnip, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,609 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Lobster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Boil the lobsters in a fish kettle covered with cold water over high heat.

  2. Remove the small bladder near the head and the vein under the shell along the back.

  3. Pound the under shell and small claws in a mortar.

Make the soup

  1. Combine the pounded mixture with broth or water in a pan and bring to a gentle boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the soup through a sieve, pressing with a masher to extract the juice.

  3. Mash the parsnip and add it to the soup for thickness.

  4. Stir in a little butter and adjust the consistency with additional broth.

Serve

  1. Place some lobster meat in a tureen and pour the soup over it.

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

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

  2. Parsnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,051 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

  3. Lobster + parsniptop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobsters
Provide the sweet meat and flavourful shells that give the soup its character.
Parsnip
Mashed into the soup to add body and thicken it.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.

Swap the parsnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, butter):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Onionfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, butter. 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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