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Curried Lobster

A lobster dish simmered in a curry sauce with onion, stock, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Curried Lobster

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. In a pan, melt butter and fry the minced onion until soft.

  2. Add the coarse sea salt, soup stock, and curry powder; cook gently for 5 minutes.

  3. Stir in the lobster and heat thoroughly.

Serve

  1. Serve with plain boiled rice.

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. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  3. Lobster + oniontop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together474 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main protein, which firms and turns opaque as it heats through.
Curry powder
Supplies the dominant spice aroma and flavour of the sauce.
Soup stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the spices and moistens the lobster.
Minced onion
Softens in butter to add sweetness and savoury body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the lobster and heat thoroughly. Lobster is delicate and toughens and turns rubbery when overcooked. Adding it last, over gentle heat, warms it through just until it is opaque and tender.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits about as well
  2. Onionthe original
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Chivefits about as well

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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