Name: Lobster Salad
Ingredients: lobster; crisp white lettuce leaves; mayonnaise; dressing; nasturtium blossoms (optional)

Why it works: Lobster and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 411 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Mince the lobster as you would for chicken salad.
Arrange two or three crisp white lettuce leaves in a shell shape on a platter.

Assemble

Mix the minced lobster with mayonnaise.
Place a spoonful of the lobster mixture in each lettuce shell.
Add a teaspoon of dressing over each serving.
Garnish with a nasturtium blossom if in season.

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 + 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: Forms the main body of the salad and provides its savory, delicate flavor.
Crisp white lettuce leaves: Hold the salad in a shell shape and add cool, crisp texture.
Mayonnaise: Binds the minced lobster together and adds richness and 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.