Name: Crab Salad
Ingredients: meat from cooked crab; mayonnaise or dressing (as used in lobster salad); crab shell (for serving)

Why it works: Crab and lobster work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 196 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Crab Salad

Ingredients

meat from cooked crab
mayonnaise or dressing (as used in lobster salad)
crab shell (for serving)

Directions

Prepare

Mince the meat from the cooked crab.

Dress and serve

Dress the minced crab meat with mayonnaise or dressing as you would for lobster salad.
Serve the dressed crab on the back shell of the crab.

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.

Crab + lobstertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together196 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).
Meat + crabtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together448 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).
Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together909 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Crab meat: Provides the main flavour and the tender, flaky texture of the salad.
Mayonnaise: Adds moisture and richness, binding the minced crab into a creamy salad.

“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.