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Crab Salad

A salad of crab meat, celery, egg, tomato, seasoned with salt, pepper, vinegar, and mayonnaise, garnished with lettuce and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Crab Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine crab meat, celery, hard-boiled egg, and tomato slices.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and diluted vinegar.

  3. Add mayonnaise dressing and mix thoroughly.

Serve

  1. Transfer to a serving bowl and garnish with lettuce leaves.

  2. Sprinkle capers on top for added flavor, if desired.

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. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab meat
Provides the main body and delicate sweet flavor of the salad.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds soft, creamy texture and richness to the mixture.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture that bind the salad together.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mildly vegetal crunch.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness.

The step that matters

Season with diluted vinegar before adding mayonnaise. Acid is best distributed through the crab and vegetables before the fat of the mayonnaise coats them. Adding it in small amounts and tasting keeps the balance right, since too much acid makes the salad sharp and too little leaves it flat.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, celery, egg, pepper, vinegar, lettuce. 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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