Name: Lobster Salad
Ingredients: 1 hen lobster; lettuces; endive; small salad (whatever is in season); a little chopped beetroot; 2 hard-boiled eggs; a few slices of cucumber; salad dressing

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

Wash the salad and dry it by shaking it in a cloth.
Cut up the lettuces and endive, pour the dressing on them, and lightly mix in the small salad.
Pick the meat from the lobster shell and cut it into square pieces; add half to the salad and reserve the other half for garnish.
Separate the yolks from the whites of the hard-boiled eggs; chop the whites finely and rub the yolks through a sieve.
Garnish the salad on a glass dish with sliced cucumber, pieces of lobster, yolks, whites, coral, and beetroot placed 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.

Lettuce + endivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together284 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lettuce + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together678 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Endive + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together132 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

Swap the cucumber

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

Chivefits better
Spinachfits better
Mustardfits about as well
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.