Name: Lobster and Crab Patties
Ingredients: lobster or crab meat; ½ cup cream; 1 tablespoon butter; cayenne pepper to taste; mace to taste; white pepper to taste; 1 teaspoon lemon juice

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lobster and Crab Patties

Ingredients

Directions

Pound the lobster or crab meat very smoothly or mince it very fine.
Moisten the meat with cream and stir it over low heat with butter.
Season with cayenne, mace, and white pepper to taste.
Add lemon juice for extra flavor.
Once it boils, fill pattie cases with the mixture.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,050 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,695 recipes

Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).
Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,257 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, cream, butter, pepper, mace, lemon):

Nutmegfits better
Parsleyfits better
Tarragonfits better
White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, cream, butter, pepper, mace, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.