Name: Lobster Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup boiled lobster, chopped; ½ cup chopped celery; mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Lobster and celery work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 251 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

1 cup boiled lobster, chopped
½ cup chopped celery
mayonnaise dressing

Directions

In a bowl, mix the chopped lobster and celery.
Drizzle with mayonnaise dressing before serving.
Serve the mixture in a lobster shell, red apple, or on a lettuce leaf.

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.

Lobster + celerytop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together251 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled lobster: Provides the main protein and meaty texture of the salad.
Celery: Adds crisp texture and a fresh, slightly sharp crunch against the soft lobster.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess, binding the lobster and celery together with moisture.

“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.