Name: Lobster Salad
Ingredients: lobster; fresh lettuce; salad dressing

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

lobster
fresh lettuce
salad dressing

Directions

Chop the lobster and mix it with half as much fresh lettuce.
Pour your favorite salad dressing over the mixture.

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: Provides the main protein and savory, sweet flavor of the salad.
Fresh lettuce: Adds crisp texture and fresh, watery bulk that lightens the salad.
Salad dressing: Adds moisture, fat and acidity that coat the lobster and lettuce and carry flavor.

“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.