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Cheese Sandwiches

A sandwich made with a mixture of hard‑boiled egg yolk, grated cheese, spices, and butter, served between biscuits or oat‑cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Mustard and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 121 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cheese Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Remove the yolk from the hard-boiled egg and place it in a small bowl.

  2. Crumble the yolk and mix in the melted butter until smooth.

  3. Add the salt, pepper, mustard, and grated cheese, mixing well after each addition.

  4. Stir in the vinegar or cold water to achieve the desired thickness.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread the mixture between two biscuits or pieces of oat-cake to serve.

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. Mustard + biscuittop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together121 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  5. Cheese + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,805 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

Hard-boiled egg
Its yolk gives the filling body and a rich, creamy texture.
Common cheese
Adds savoury flavour and firmness to the spread.
Melted butter
Adds fat, making the mixture smooth and spreadable.
Vinegar or cold water
Loosens the mixture, letting you adjust its thickness.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts the richness.

The step that matters

Stir in the vinegar or cold water. Add it gradually. Too much liquid thins the spread past the desired thickness, and it cannot be fully reversed without adding more of the other ingredients.

“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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