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Checker Board Sandwiches

A sandwich made by alternating slices of brown and wheat bread, buttered and pressed into a checkerboard pattern.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Checker Board Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Bake brown or graham bread in ordinary bread pans to match the size and shape of wheat bread.

  2. Cut the baked bread into one-inch slices.

Build the checkerboard

  1. Butter one slice of brown bread and one slice of wheat bread thickly, then press the buttered sides together.

  2. Cut the thick sandwich into one-inch slices crosswise.

  3. Spread each slice thickly with butter or desired sandwich paste on the cut side showing the brown and white layers.

  4. Press the slices together in pairs to form long blocks, alternating brown and white layers like a checkerboard.

Slice and serve

  1. Cut each block into thin slices and arrange on a serving plate to display the checks.

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

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

  2. Bread + wheattop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Wheat + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown bread
Provides the darker layer that contrasts with the white bread to create the checkered pattern.
Wheat bread
Provides the lighter layer that contrasts with the brown bread to create the checkered pattern.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture and binds the stacked bread slices together.

The step that matters

Pressing the buttered slices together in pairs. If the layers are not spread thickly and pressed firmly, the stacked blocks can slide apart or stay loose, so the checks will not hold their alignment when sliced.

“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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