Name: Egg and Sardine Sandwiches
Ingredients: 1 small box of sardines; 1 hard-boiled egg for every 4 sardines; 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon salad dressing for every egg used; Salt to taste; Pepper to taste; Thin slices of bread, crusts removed

Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Egg and Sardine Sandwiches

Ingredients

1 small box of sardines
1 hard-boiled egg for every 4 sardines
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon salad dressing for every egg used
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
Thin slices of bread, crusts removed

Directions

Prepare the filling

Open the sardines and rinse them under cold water to remove the oil.
Remove the skin from the sardines and chop or pound them finely.
Mix the sardines with one hard-boiled egg for every four sardines.

Assemble the sandwiches

Add salad dressing, salt, and pepper to the mixture and combine well.
Spread the mixture onto thin slices of bread and form into sandwiches.

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.

Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together50,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sardines: Provide the main fish flavour and the body of the filling.
Hard-boiled eggs: Add creamy body and bulk to the filling, softening the fish texture.
Salad dressing: Adds moisture and tang, binding the mixture into a spreadable filling.

“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.