Name: Lobster Salad
Ingredients: lobster; celery or lettuce; ice; salad dressing or 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

lobster
celery or lettuce
ice
salad dressing or mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Prepare

Cut up and season the lobster as you would chicken.
If using lettuce, take small crisp leaves, wash them, and soak in ice water for a few moments, then place on ice.

Assemble and serve

Arrange the lettuce leaves to form sheets and place the lobster salad in them.
Top the lobster with 2 tablespoons of salad dressing.
Use small pieces of celery as a garnish.

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

Lobster: Provides the main meaty texture and flavor of the salad.
Salad dressing or mayonnaise dressing: Adds moisture and richness, binding the lobster with a creamy coating.
Celery or lettuce: Adds crisp texture that contrasts with the tender lobster.

“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.