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Fried Egg Sandwich

A sandwich made with thin bread, fried eggs, butter, salt, pepper, parsley or watercress, lettuce, and a red radish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Radish and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Fried Egg Sandwich

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter one side of each slice of bread.

  2. Place a leaf of lettuce on one slice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Add the fried eggs on top of the lettuce.

  2. Season the eggs with salt and pepper.

  3. Sprinkle with chopped parsley or watercress.

  4. Top with the second slice of bread, buttered side down.

  5. Serve with a red radish.

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. Radish + lettucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + radishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together120 recipes

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

  5. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the rich, filling body of the sandwich and bind it together as they are cooked.
Butter
Adds richness and helps brown the bread on the outside.
Thin bread
Holds the filling together and gives a contrasting crisp or toasted texture.

Swap the radish

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, butter, pepper, parsley, lettuce. 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.

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