Name: Crab Salad
Ingredients: two heads of lettuce; three dozen hard-shell crabs twenty-five minutes

Why it works: Lettuce and crab work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 111 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Crab Salad

Ingredients

two heads of lettuce
three dozen hard-shell crabs twenty-five minutes

Directions

Prepare the crab

Boil three dozen hard-shell crabs for twenty-five minutes.
Drain and let them cool gradually.
Remove the upper shell and the tail, break the remainder apart and pick out the meat carefully.
Pick out the large claws, which contain a dainty morsel.
Pick out the creamy fat attached to the upper shell.

Assemble and serve

Line a salad bowl with the small white leaves of two heads of lettuce.
Add the crab meat.
Pour over it a mayonnaise garnish with crab claws, hard-boiled eggs, and little mounds of cress leaves.
Mix with the salad when served.

Nutrition, whole recipe (rough)

102Calories

20 gProtein

2 gFat

1 gCarbs

What these numbers assume: 2 portions

Ingredient	Portion assumed	kcal
Crab	100g cooked	97
Lettuce	1 cup shredded (36g)	5

One typical portion per ingredient; the recipe's quantities are not counted. A rough guide only, not for medical or dietary planning.

By F. L. Gillette and Hugo Ziemann. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

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.

Lettuce + crabtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together111 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

Hard-shell crabs: Provide the main meat that forms the body of the salad.
Lettuce: Forms a crisp bed that holds the crab meat and garnish.
Mayonnaise (in the method): Adds richness and moisture to the crab meat and garnish.

“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.