Name: Lobster Salad
Ingredients: meat from 1 lobster; 2 hard-boiled eggs; shredded lettuce; sliced beet; sliced cucumber; mayonnaise sauce; coarse sea salt; pepper

Why it works: Lettuce and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the meat from the lobster body and tail, and slice it into ¼-inch thick pieces.
Chop the whites of the hard-boiled eggs and sieve the yolks.
Mix the lobster spawn or coral with the sauce and any bits.
In a bowl, layer shredded lettuce, then add lobster slices, quartered hard-boiled eggs, beet, and cucumber.
Repeat the layers, sprinkling egg and coral between them.
Reserve some egg, coral, and beet for decoration on top.
Before serving, pour mayonnaise sauce over the salad.

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.

Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Lobster + saucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,095 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cucumber + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,991 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together909 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Swap the cucumber

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

Mustardfits better
Capsicumfits better
Spinachfits better
Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, lobster, egg, lettuce, sauce, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.