Name: Olive Sandwiches
Ingredients: 6 queen olives; 1 tablespoon salad dressing; buttered bread

Why it works: Olive and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,091 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Olive Sandwiches

Ingredients

6 queen olives
1 tablespoon salad dressing
buttered bread

Directions

Prepare the filling

Remove the flesh from the stones of the olives and chop it finely.
Mix the chopped olives with the salad dressing.

Assemble and cut

Spread the mixture on thin slices of buttered bread.
Form the sandwiches and cut them into small squares.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Olive + breadtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,091 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Queen olives: Provide the main flavour and salty, briny character of the filling.
Salad dressing: Binds the chopped olives into a spreadable mixture and adds moisture and tang.
Buttered bread: Provides the structure and a rich, soft base that holds the 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.