Name: Crab Meat Salad
Ingredients: 1 pound can crab meat; 4 hard cooked eggs; ½ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon paprika; ½ cup blanched almonds; 1 cup cream salad dressing; 1 pint whipping cream; 1 green pepper or pimento; Lettuce

Why it works: Almond and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 210 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Crab Meat Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Remove bones from crab meat and cut it into large pieces.
Cut the egg whites into cubes.
Slice the almonds into thin strips.
Mix the crab meat, egg whites, and almonds together.
Whip the cream until very stiff.
Gently fold the whipped cream into the mayonnaise dressing.
Add salt and paprika to the dressing.
Combine the dressing with the crab mixture.
Serve small mounds on individual salad plates on a bed of lettuce.
Garnish with strips of pimento or green pepper and top with a piece of egg yolk.

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.

Almond + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together210 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together448 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).
Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Crab + creamtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together317 recipes

Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).
Crab + lettucetop 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

Swap the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, meat, egg, cream, pepper, lettuce):

Walnutfits about as well
Beansfits about as well
Almondthe original
Sesamefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, egg, cream, pepper, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.