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Lobster Salad

A salad of boiled lobster meat, celery, mayonnaise dressing, crisp lettuce, garnished with hard‑boiled eggs, olives, and lobster coral.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster and celery

  1. Remove the meat from the boiled lobsters and discard the stomach, spongy parts, and vein from the tail.

  2. Cut the lobster meat into cubes.

  3. Clean, wash, and dry the celery, then cut it into pieces.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix the celery with the lobster meat and stir in the Mayonnaise Dressing.

  2. Line a salad bowl with crisp lettuce leaves, add the lobster salad, and spread a little more Mayonnaise Dressing on top.

  3. Garnish with hard-boiled eggs, olives, and a bit of lobster coral.

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

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

  3. Celery + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Lobster + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Lobster + lettucetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together411 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

Lobster meat
Forms the main body of the salad, providing its texture and rich flavour.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and freshness that contrast with the soft lobster meat.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture, binding the salad and keeping it creamy.

The step that matters

Dry the celery before mixing. Excess water from washed celery thins the mayonnaise dressing and makes the salad watery, so the celery should be dried well before it is combined with the lobster and dressing.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, meat, lettuce, egg, olive. 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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