Name: Crab Salad
Ingredients: 3 dozen hard-shell crabs; 2 heads of lettuce; Mayonnaise; Hard-boiled eggs; Cress leaves

Why it works: Crab and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 111 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Crab Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

Boil the crabs for 25 minutes, then drain and let them cool.
Remove the upper shell and tail, then break apart the crabs and pick out the meat carefully.
Don't forget to include the meat from the large claws and the creamy fat from the upper shell.

Assemble and serve

Line a salad bowl with the small white leaves of the lettuce.
Add the crab meat to the bowl and pour over the mayonnaise.
Garnish with crab claws, sliced hard-boiled eggs, and little mounds of cress 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.

Crab + lettucetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together111 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Crab + eggtop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together467 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Lettuce + eggtop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,301 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).