Name: Lobster Salad
Ingredients: young salad herbs; lobster coral; lobster tail meat; lobster claw meat; hard-boiled eggs; cucumber; lettuce; young radishes; salad sauce

Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Half-fill a bowl with young salad herbs.
Blend the coral of the lobster with the sauce.
Cut the meat of the tail and claws into small pieces.
Place the lobster meat on the vegetables.
Add slices of hard-boiled eggs and cucumber.
Surround with long slices of lettuce and young radishes.
Serve with the sauce poured over.

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.

Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cucumber + radishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together212 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together58 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lobster + saucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,095 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Lobster + meattop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together909 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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, meat, egg, cucumber, lettuce, sauce):

Mustardfits better
Beetrootfits better
Shallotfits better
Radishthe original

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