Name: Ham Sandwiches
Ingredients: ½ pound cold boiled ham; ¼ cup mayonnaise; thin slices of bread

Why it works: Ham and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,536 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Ham Sandwiches

Ingredients

½ pound cold boiled ham
¼ cup mayonnaise
thin slices of bread

Directions

Chop the ham very finely without removing the fat.
Mix the chopped ham with mayonnaise.
Spread the mixture between layers of thinly sliced bread.

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.

Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold boiled ham: Provides the savoury meat that forms the sandwich filling.
Mayonnaise: Adds moisture and fat, binding the chopped ham and keeping the filling soft.
Bread: Supplies the structure that holds the filling between its layers.

“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.