Name: Lobster Salad
Ingredients: lobster meat; mayonnaise dressing; parsley

Why it works: Lobster and meat work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 909 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

lobster meat
mayonnaise dressing
parsley

Directions

Boil the lobster and carefully remove the meat from the shell.
Chop the lobster meat.
Serve the chopped lobster with mayonnaise dressing.
Garnish with parsley.

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 + meattop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together909 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Meat + parsleytop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,040 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Lobster + parsleytop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together890 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).