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Salad

Crab Mayonnaise

A chilled crab mixture with mayonnaise, lettuce, olives, paprika, and hard‑boiled eggs, served on lettuce leaves with lemon wedges.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,580 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Crab Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the chopped crab meat, shredded lettuce, and special mayonnaise.

  2. Add the chopped San Juan olives, paprika, and chopped hard-boiled eggs, then mix well.

  3. Serve the mixture on lettuce leaves, garnished with lemon wedges.

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. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  2. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

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

  4. Lettuce + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

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

  5. Crab + lettucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together111 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

Crab meat
Provides the main seafood flavour and body of the salad.
Special mayonnaise
Binds the mixture and adds richness and moisture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Adds soft texture and extra body to the filling.
San juan olives
Adds salty, briny flavour that contrasts with the rich mayonnaise.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, lettuce, olive, 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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