Name: Lobster Salad
Ingredients: canned or fresh lobster; mayonnaise dressing; lettuce

Why it works: Lobster and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 411 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

canned or fresh lobster
mayonnaise dressing
lettuce

Directions

Cut the lobster into small dice.
Mix the diced lobster with mayonnaise dressing.
Serve the mixture on a bed of lettuce.

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.

Lobster + lettucetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together411 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

Lobster: Provides the main protein and tender, meaty texture of the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds moisture and richness, binding the lobster into a creamy mixture.
Lettuce: Adds crisp texture and a cool, fresh base under the dressed lobster.

“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.