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Lobster Salad

A salad of lettuce, endive, seasonal greens, beetroot, hard‑boiled eggs, and lobster, dressed with salad dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and endive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the greens

  1. Wash the salad greens.

  2. Dry them by shaking in a cloth.

  3. Cut up the lettuces and endive.

Dress and toss the salad

  1. Pour the dressing on them.

  2. Lightly toss in the small salad greens.

  3. Mix well with the lobster meat picked from the shell.

  4. Cut the lobster meat into square pieces.

  5. Add half of the lobster meat to the salad.

  6. Reserve the other half for garnishing.

Prepare the eggs

  1. Separate the yolks from the whites of the hard‑boiled eggs.

  2. Chop the whites finely.

  3. Rub the yolks through a sieve.

Arrange and garnish

  1. Arrange the salad on a glass dish.

  2. Garnish with sliced cucumber, the reserved lobster pieces, the yolks, chopped whites, coral, and beetroot alternately.

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. Lettuce + endivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together678 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Endive + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Endive + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together87 recipes

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

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 sweet, delicate flavour of the salad.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks and whites add rich texture and contrast to the crisp greens.
Salad dressing
Coats the greens with fat and acidity, adding moisture and flavour.
Lettuces
Form the crisp, watery base that gives the salad its body.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, lettuce, endive, beetroot, egg. 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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