Name: Iced Crab Salad
Ingredients: crab meat, cut into small pieces; mayonnaise sauce; aspic jelly, well-flavored; coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Why it works: Crab and meat work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 448 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓

Iced Crab Salad

Ingredients

crab meat, cut into small pieces
mayonnaise sauce
aspic jelly, well-flavored
coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Directions

Soak the crab meat in mayonnaise sauce for 2-3 hours.
Whip the aspic jelly until frothy.
Place some whipped aspic at the bottom of a serving dish.
Layer the seasoned crab and whipped aspic alternately until the dish is nearly full.
Wrap a band of stiff paper around the dish and fill in with whipped aspic.
Set the dish on ice for 2 hours.
Remove the paper and serve.

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 + meattop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together448 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).
Crab + saucetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together238 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Meat + saucetop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,167 recipes