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Salad

Lobster Salad

A chilled salad featuring lobster, hard‑boiled eggs, beetroot, cucumber, anchovy fillets, and mayonnaise, seasoned with pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 678 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Remove the meat from the lobster and slice the tail into 1‑inch thick pieces.

  2. Marinate the lobster in oil and vinegar for 2 hours.

Assemble and serve

  1. Layer lettuce and small salad greens at the bottom of a dish.

  2. Add a layer of marinated lobster, seasoned with pepper and coarse sea salt, and repeat until the dish is piled up.

  3. Create a border around the dish with quartered hard‑boiled eggs, interspersed with sliced beetroot, cucumber, and anchovy fillets.

  4. Pour mayonnaise sauce over the top before serving.

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

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

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

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

  3. Beetroot + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together345 recipes

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

  4. Lobster + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Vinegar + cucumbertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Provides the main meaty protein, which firms up and turns opaque when cooked.
Oil
Carries flavour and adds richness, coating the lobster during marinating.
Vinegar
Acidity in the marinade seasons the lobster and brightens the flavour of the salad.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add creamy richness and body to the salad border.
Mayonnaise sauce
Adds fat and creaminess, moistening the layered salad when poured over the top.

The step that matters

Marinating the lobster. Acid from the vinegar begins to change the texture of the lobster's surface proteins. Marinating for the full 2 hours is the time given in the record, and over-long soaking can make the lobster tough and mushy, so timing matters.

Swap the beetroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, vinegar, lettuce, pepper, egg, cucumber, anchovy):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Beetrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, vinegar, lettuce, pepper, egg, cucumber, anchovy. 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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