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Salad

Shrimp Salad

A salad of lettuce, hard‑boiled eggs, shrimp, lemon, and dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,559 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Shrimp Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare 2 heads of lettuce and place them in a salad bowl.

  2. Slice 3 hard boiled eggs and add them to the bowl.

  3. Add 1 cup of crisp sliced lettuce and 1 can of shrimp.

  4. Pour salad dressing over the salad just before serving.

  5. Garnish with 1 thinly sliced lemon.

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 + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + shrimptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together430 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Shrimp + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Egg + shrimptop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,829 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Forms the crisp base of the salad and carries the other ingredients.
Hard boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy texture to the salad.
Shrimp
Provides the main protein and a mild, briny flavor.

The step that matters

Pour salad dressing over the salad just before serving. Dressing draws moisture out of lettuce through osmosis and wilts it, so adding it late keeps the leaves crisp.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, shrimp, lemon):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, shrimp, lemon. 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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