Name: Anchovy Sandwiches
Ingredients: boneless anchovies; 3 hard boiled eggs, mashed; lemon juice, to taste; coarse sea salt, to taste; 2 tablespoons soft butter; graham bread, sliced; lettuce leaves; stuffed olives with red pepper, for garnish

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Anchovy Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

In a bowl, mix the boneless anchovies with the mashed hard boiled eggs.
Add lemon juice and coarse sea salt to taste, then mix in the soft butter.
Spread the mixture on unbuttered slices of graham bread.

Assemble and garnish

Place a lettuce leaf between two slices.
Garnish with olives stuffed with red pepper.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,922 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 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

Boneless anchovies: Provide the main savory, salty flavor of the filling.
Hard boiled eggs: Add body and creaminess, binding the filling together.
Soft butter: Adds richness and a smoother, spreadable texture to the filling.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich, salty filling.
Graham bread: Provides the base that holds the spread and gives a slightly sweet, nutty flavor.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, lemon, butter, bread, olive, pepper):

Capsicumfits better
Asparagusfits better
Tomatofits better
Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lemon, butter, bread, olive, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.