Name: Shrimp Salad
Ingredients: 3 cans Dunbar shrimp; 14 heads of lettuce

Why it works: Shrimp and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 430 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Shrimp Salad

Ingredients

3 cans Dunbar shrimp
14 heads of lettuce

Directions

Prepare

Drain the shrimp and place them in a large bowl.
Wash and chop the lettuce into bite-sized pieces.

Combine and serve

Combine the shrimp and lettuce in the bowl.
Toss gently to mix the ingredients evenly.
Serve chilled.

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.

Shrimp + lettucetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together430 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Shrimp: Provides the main protein and savory flavor of the salad.
Lettuce: Forms the crisp, leafy base that gives the salad its bulk and texture.

“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.