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Lobster Salad

A salad made with boiled lobster, garlic or onion, celery, chives, parsley, lettuce, egg, mayonnaise, olive oil, vinegar, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Chive and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Cut the boiled lobster in half and remove the meat, discarding the gall.

  2. Dice the lobster meat.

  3. Place the diced lobster in a bowl rubbed with garlic or onion.

Make the salad

  1. Add chopped celery, green chives, onion juice, minced hard-boiled egg, chopped parsley, and chopped lettuce.

  2. Season with salt, white pepper, olive oil, vinegar, and mayonnaise.

  3. Toss everything together well.

Serve

  1. Serve in lettuce cups.

  2. Decorate with capers, olives, and rings of hard-boiled eggs.

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. Chive + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  3. Chive + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Chive + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Lobster
Provides the main body and sweet flavour of the salad.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the salad into a creamy dressing.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds richness and body, and its minced texture thickens the salad.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich mayonnaise and lobster.
Olive oil
Adds fat and smoothness to the dressing.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mild crunch.

The step that matters

Dice the lobster meat evenly. Uniform pieces let the dressing coat every bite evenly and give the salad a consistent texture. Overworked or mashed lobster turns stringy and dense.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, celery, chive, onion, egg, parsley, 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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