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Lobster Salad

A salad of lobster meat, lettuce, hard‑boiled eggs, radishes, and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Separate the body from the tail of the lobster and crack the claws at the joints without injuring the meat.

  2. Split the tail in half.

Assemble and serve

  1. Finely chop the outer lettuce leaves and mix with the canned lobster.

  2. Arrange the mixture on a dish in a mound with a border of reserved lettuce leaves.

  3. Peel the hard-boiled eggs, cut them in half, and remove the yolks from some halves to place a small red radish in each cup.

  4. Pour mayonnaise over the salad and arrange the lobster body and claws on top.

  5. Decorate the dish with the halved eggs and radishes among the salad leaves.

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.

  1. Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Lobster + lettucetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together411 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Lobster + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,484 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  4. Lettuce + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Egg + radishtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main meaty protein and flavour of the salad.
Lettuce
Adds crisp body and fresh bulk that holds the salad together and frames the dish.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a firm, creamy texture from the cooked yolks and whites.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the salad and giving it a creamy coating.
Radishes
Add a crisp, peppery bite that contrasts with the rich eggs and mayonnaise.

The step that matters

Cracking the claws without injuring the meat. Cracking at the joints lets the shell break cleanly so the meat stays whole and intact. Forcing the shell or crushing the claw shatters the meat and shell fragments can mix into the salad.

Swap the radish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, lettuce, egg):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, lettuce, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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