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Fish Salad

A salad of lobster meat, hard‑boiled eggs, cucumber, capers, anchovy fillets, dressed with salt, pepper, vinegar, and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and capers share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Break the lobster in half and extract the meat in one piece.

  2. Break the claws and cut the meat into slices about ¼ inch thick.

Assemble and dress the salad

  1. Fill a bowl halfway with salad herbs.

  2. Arrange the lobster meat on the salad.

  3. Remove the soft part from the lobster belly and mix it in a bowl with salt, pepper, vinegar, and oil.

  4. Stir well and pour the mixture over the salad.

  5. Top with sliced hard-boiled eggs, cucumber slices, capers, and anchovy fillets.

  6. Stir lightly and serve, or use salad sauce.

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. Endive + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Cucumber + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lobster + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Capers + anchovytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together473 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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, with firm, sweet meat that holds its shape when sliced.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy texture against the firmer lobster meat.
Oil
Carries fat-soluble flavour and gives the dressing a smooth, rounded body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the dressing and balances the richness of oil and lobster.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (endive, lobster, pepper, vinegar, egg, capers, anchovy):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against endive, lobster, pepper, vinegar, egg, capers, anchovy. 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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