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Salad

Lobster Salad

A salad of lettuce, endive, seasonal greens, beetroot, cucumber, hard‑boiled egg, and lobster, dressed with oil, vinegar, mustard, cayenne, salt, anchovy essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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

Prepare the salad

  1. Wash the salad and dry it by shaking it in a cloth.

  2. Tear up the lettuces and endive.

Dress the salad

  1. Pour the dressing on them and lightly mix in the small salad.

  2. Blend all well together with the meat of the lobster.

Prepare the lobster and egg

  1. Pick the meat from the claws.

  2. Cut the lobster meat into nice square pieces.

  3. Add half of the lobster pieces to the salad, reserving the other half for garnishing.

  4. Separate the yolk from the white of the hard‑boiled egg.

  5. Chop the white finely.

  6. Rub the yolk through a sieve.

Plate and garnish

  1. Arrange the salad lightly on a glass dish.

  2. Garnish with a row of sliced cucumber, the reserved lobster pieces, the yolk and white of the egg, and the beetroot, arranging them in small separate groups for contrast.

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. Lettuce + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together678 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Endive + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lettuce + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  5. Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main sweet, rich seafood flavour and meaty texture of the salad.
Lettuces
Form the crisp, light base that holds the dressing and other ingredients.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds richness from the yolk and a firm, mild texture from the white.
Oil
Adds fat that carries flavour and gives the dressing a smooth, coating body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of oil and lobster.
Made mustard
Helps the oil and vinegar bind into a smoother, more cohesive dressing.

The step that matters

Dry the salad well before dressing. Water left on the leaves dilutes the dressing and stops it clinging, so the leaves end up thinly coated and the dressing pools at the bottom of the dish.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Horseradishfits about as well
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, lettuce, endive, beetroot, egg, vinegar, mustard. 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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