Name: Crab Salad
Ingredients: canned crab meat; crisp lettuce leaves; finely chopped tender celery; hard-cooked egg, riced; mayonnaise dressing; chopped sour pickle (optional)

Why it works: Lettuce and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Crab Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Remove crab meat from the can and cut into uniform pieces.
Set the crab meat on ice to chill completely.
Place the chilled crab meat on crisp lettuce leaves.
Sprinkle finely chopped celery and riced hard-cooked egg over the crab.
Add a generous spoonful of mayonnaise dressing on top.
Keep chilled until ready to serve.
Optionally, add chopped sour pickle.

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.

Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together448 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).
Crab + lettucetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together111 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Crab + celerytop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together108 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Meat + lettucetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together579 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).