Name: Lobster Salad Mayonnaise
Ingredients: lobster; mayonnaise sauce; parsley; crayfish or prawns (for garnish); lobster butter (optional for coloring); parsley juice (optional for coloring); plovers' eggs (optional for garnish); beetroot (for decoration)

Why it works: Parsley and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 745 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lobster Salad Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lobster and remove the gills.
Mix the lobster with mayonnaise sauce.
Chop parsley and sprinkle it over the dish.
For garnish, place a small crayfish in the corner of the dish.
Optionally, color the mayonnaise with lobster butter or parsley juice.
Use plovers' eggs or beetroot cutouts for decoration.

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.

Parsley + beetroottop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together745 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lobster + saucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,095 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Lobster + crayfishtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together100 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).
Sauce + crayfishtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together195 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Crayfish + buttertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together343 recipes

Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, sauce, crayfish, butter, egg, beetroot):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Parsleythe original
Nutmegfits about as well

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