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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: Radish and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil live lobsters in salted boiling water for 20 to 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the meat from the shell and cut it into half-inch pieces, reserving the tomalley.

  3. Mix the lobster meat with salt and plenty of olive oil, then chill on ice for a few hours.

  4. Add twice as much cold water as malt vinegar, a little celery salt, and plenty of mayonnaise dressing along with the tomalley.

  5. Garnish with sliced hard-boiled eggs, radishes, and olives, and serve on tender lettuce leaves.

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. Radish + lettucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  4. Celery + radishtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together101 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Vinegar + radishtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together508 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the radish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, malt, vinegar, celery, egg, olive, lettuce):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Radishthe original

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

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