Name: Lettuce Sandwiches
Ingredients: shredded leaf lettuce; mayonnaise or French dressing; buttered bread

Why it works: Lettuce and bread work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Lettuce Sandwiches

Ingredients

shredded leaf lettuce
mayonnaise or French dressing
buttered bread

Directions

Mix shredded leaf lettuce with mayonnaise or French dressing.
Spread butter on slices of bread.
Place the lettuce mixture between the buttered bread slices.

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.

Lettuce + breadtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together602 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Shredded leaf lettuce: Provides crisp texture and fresh bulk filling the sandwich.
Mayonnaise or french dressing: Adds moisture and richness that coats the lettuce and keeps it from drying out.
Buttered bread: Provides the structure that holds the filling and adds fat and a soft, rich texture.

“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.