Skip to main content
Main

Lobster Soup

A soup made by boiling lobsters, extracting their meat, and simmering the broth with butter and optional parsnip.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 lobsters

  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 heat gently for 30 minutes.

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

  3. If desired, mash a small piece of parsnip into the soup for thickness.

  4. Add a little butter and adjust the broth to your desired consistency.

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. Butter + parsniptop 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 meat and, through the pounded shells, the main sweet, savory flavor of the soup.
Broth or water
Forms the liquid base that carries the lobster flavor and sets the soup's volume.
Butter
Adds fat, which gives the finished soup a smoother, richer mouthfeel and carries flavor.
Parsnip
Its starch thickens the soup when mashed into it, adding body.

The step that matters

Heating the pounded shells gently. Boiling the shell mixture hard for 30 minutes can make the soup cloudy and dull its delicate lobster flavor. Gentle heat extracts flavor slowly while keeping the liquid clear.

Swap the parsnip

The recipe marks parsnip as optional. 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.

You might also like

Lobster SauceLobster Sauce174 recipesLobster CroquettesLobster Croquettes99 recipesParsnip CakesParsnip Cakes12 recipesLobster BallsLobster Balls7 recipes