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Lobster Salad

A salad of boiled lobster meat mixed with various butter dressings and garnished with beetroot, carrots, and hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and spinach share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 97 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the lobsters

  1. If the lobsters are not boiled, place them in boiling water with coarse sea salt, head first, and cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour, depending on size.

  2. Once cooked, remove the lobsters and plunge them into cold water.

  3. When cool, remove the claws and the coral from a hen lobster, and mix the soft portion with the dressing.

Make the dressings

  1. Pound the coral with an equal weight of butter, add ½ teaspoon lemon juice, and a pinch of cayenne pepper.

  2. Rub through a sieve and chill until firm.

  3. Pound equal parts watercress and spinach with ½ teaspoon salt, press through a sieve to extract juice, and mix with 1 ounce of butter.

  4. Chill until set.

  5. Pass the yolk of 1 or 2 hard-boiled eggs through a sieve, add 2 drops of tarragon vinegar, and mix with 1.5 ounces of butter.

  6. Set aside.

Prepare and arrange the garnish

  1. Cut beetroot into rings and stamp out shapes like stars or hearts.

  2. Cut deep red carrots to match the beetroot.

  3. Boil 3 eggs hard, cut the whites into fancy patterns, and arrange on a dish.

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. Watercress + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + watercresstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 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

Lobsters
Provide the main cooked meat that forms the body of the salad.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel to each dressing once chilled.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks are pressed smooth and bound with butter to form a rich, creamy dressing.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the coral dressing and balances its richness.
Watercress
Its juice gives the green dressing a fresh, peppery flavour and colour.

The step that matters

Pressing the coral and herb mixtures through a sieve. Sieving breaks down fibres and removes lumps, giving the smooth, set texture the dressings need. Butter that is too warm or too cold will not set properly, so chill each mixture until firm before using.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, butter, lemon, pepper, vinegar, watercress, egg):

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Horseradishfits about as well
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, butter, lemon, pepper, vinegar, watercress, egg. 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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