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Salad

Cbab Salad

A salad of shredded crab meat mixed with vinegar, olive oil, parsley, and served on lettuce with egg, capers, and olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cbab Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Shred the meat from the crabs.

  2. In a bowl, combine crab meat, vinegar, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Mix in the chopped parsley.

Serve

  1. Serve the mixture on a bed of crisp lettuce leaves.

  2. Garnish with slices of hard-boiled egg, capers, and olives.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  3. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  4. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Meat + crabtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab meat
Forms the main body of the salad and carries its flavour.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet flavour of the crab.
Olive oil
Adds fat that coats the crab meat and gives it a smoother mouthfeel.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, crab, vinegar, pepper, olive, parsley, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, crab, vinegar, pepper, olive, parsley, 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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