Name: Lobster Salad
Ingredients: lobster meat; coarse sea salt; mustard; French dressing or mayonnaise; vinegar; lettuce stalks; firm lettuce leaves; mayonnaise; celery (optional)

Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lobster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Chop the lobster meat finely.
Season with coarse sea salt and mustard.
Pour over French dressing or mayonnaise thinned with vinegar and let it sit to season.
At serving time, add half the volume of chopped lettuce stalks and firm leaves.
Mix in plenty of mayonnaise and serve in cleaned shells.

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.

Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,356 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,169 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Meat + mustardtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together855 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, meat, mustard, vinegar, lettuce):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Celerythe original
Turmericfits about as well

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