Name: Crab Salad
Ingredients: crabs; mayonnaise dressing; white lettuce; lemon slices; small red radishes

Why it works: Lettuce and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Crab Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crabs by removing the fat.
Make a mayonnaise dressing.
Line a flat dish with white lettuce leaves.
Heap the picked crab in the center of the dish.
Serve the dressing in a separate dish.
Garnish with lemon slices or small red radishes.

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.

Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together58 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lettuce + lemontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,559 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lemon + radishtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together174 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Crab + lettucetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together111 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Crab + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together387 recipes

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