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Salad

Crab Salad

A salad of crab meat mixed with mayonnaise, seasoned with salt, paprika, and lemon juice, served in shells on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,580 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Crab Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. If using fresh crabs, boil them until cooked, then pick out the meat.

  2. Season the crab meat with coarse sea salt, paprika, and lemon juice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Add ½ cup of mayonnaise and toss lightly.

  2. Heap the mixture into cleaned crab shells lined with lettuce leaves.

  3. Top each mound with a teaspoon of mayonnaise and garnish with lemon triangles and small olives.

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 + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Lemon + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

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

  4. Crab + lettucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Crab + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together387 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab meat
Forms the main body of the salad and supplies its savory flavor.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the crab into a creamy, spreadable mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich crab and mayonnaise.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, lettuce, olive):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, lettuce, olive. 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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