Name: Dressed Crab
Ingredients: 1 large crab; ¼ cup mayonnaise or salad dressing; Mixed salad (quarter lettuce hearts, blanched endive, watercress, or seasonal greens)

Why it works: Crab and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 111 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Dressed Crab

Ingredients

1 large crab
¼ cup mayonnaise or salad dressing
Mixed salad (quarter lettuce hearts, blanched endive, watercress, or seasonal greens)

Directions

Prepare the crab

Crack all the claws of the crab, keeping the flesh intact.
Set the claw meat aside and save the black tips of the shells for garnish.
Remove the breast or thorax from the shell, clearing away the apron and gills.
Pick out all the white meat and place it on a plate.
On another plate, place the firm contents of the carapace, dividing them into hazelnut-sized pieces.

Assemble and serve

In a serving dish, layer the carapace contents, then add the picked breast meat.
Arrange the claw pieces around the top and garnish with the saved shell tips.
Surround the crab with a moderate quantity of mixed salad.
Pour the mayonnaise or salad dressing over the crab before serving.

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 + lettucetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together111 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab: Provides the main body of meat, forming the dish's core flavour and texture.
Mayonnaise or salad dressing: Adds moisture and richness, coating the crab meat with fat and a creamy texture.

“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.