Skip to main content
Main

Meat Sandwiches

A sandwich made with bread, butter or mayonnaise, cooked meat, and optional seasonings and fillings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Meat Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fillings

  1. Chop chicken and celery together.

  2. Mix the chopped chicken and celery with mayonnaise or fresh dressing.

  3. Chop or pound meats to a paste.

  4. Mix the paste with hard-boiled eggs and cream.

  5. Season the mixture with salt, pepper, and onion juice if desired.

  6. Mix chopped ham with mustard, cream or mayonnaise, and chopped pickles or olives.

  7. Cook chicken livers until tender with a thin slice of onion, a few peppercorns, and salt.

  8. Chop the cooked chicken livers finely.

  9. Mix the chopped livers with cream or mayonnaise.

Assemble the sandwiches

  1. Spread the bread with butter or mayonnaise.

  2. Mix the cooked meat with mayonnaise.

  3. Add a crisp lettuce leaf or watercress with the meat.

  4. Season thinly sliced meat with salt, pepper, and mustard if using ham.

  5. Spread the seasoned meat with mayonnaise or French dressing if desired.

  6. For game meat, prepare as for meat and add chopped olives or pickles for improvement.

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 + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Meat + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and a soft, creamy texture to the chopped meat filling.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the chopped meat filling soft and spreadable.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the filling and keeping the sandwich from drying out.
Chicken livers
Provide a rich, savory flavor and a smooth texture when chopped finely.

The step that matters

Chop or pound meats to a paste. A smooth, evenly fine paste spreads well and binds with the eggs and cream; coarse pieces make the filling crumbly and hard to spread.

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, meat, pepper, chicken, celery, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, meat, pepper, chicken, celery, egg. 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.

More meat sandwich recipes

Potted 3 See all 2 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes