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 ↓
Boiled Lobster
Ingredients
Directions
Cook the lobster
Put the live lobster head downward in salted warm water and cover.
Boil for 30 minutes until it turns scarlet.
Remove the lobster and let it cool.
Prepare the meat
Twist off the claws and remove the tail.
Shake out the greenish liver and red coral.
Remove the meat from the shell, discarding the stomach.
Split the body in half and extract the meat from the cells.
Take the meat from the tail and claws, discarding the vein.
Serve
Arrange the lobster meat on a dish, garnishing with the red claws.
Serve cold with French dressing or on lettuce with mayonnaise.
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.
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Lobster + lettucetop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Live lobster
- Provides the meat, which is the main component of the dish.
- Mayonnaise
- Adds fat and creamy moisture to the cold lobster meat.
- French dressing
- Adds acidity and moisture to the cold lobster meat.
The step that matters
Boil for 30 minutes until it turns scarlet. Boiling denatures the proteins in the shell and meat, turning the shell scarlet and firming the meat. Under-cooking leaves the meat soft and translucent, while over-cooking makes it tough and rubbery.
“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.
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