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Lobster Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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

  1. Remove the meat from the lobster shell and cut it into small pieces.

  2. In a salad bowl or deep dish, layer the lobster meat with small pieces of lettuce and endive.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  4. Dress with oil and vinegar or mayonnaise sauce.

  5. Garnish with quarters of hard-boiled eggs, sliced beetroot, fillets of anchovies, and parsley.

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. Lobster + saucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

  4. Endive + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

Swap the endive

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Endivethe original

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

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