Name: Pimento Sandwiches
Ingredients: 1 small can of sweet pimentoes; 1 small package of cream cheese; 1 small loaf of bread

Why it works: Cream cheese and bread work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 166 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Pimento Sandwiches

Ingredients

1 small can of sweet pimentoes
1 small package of cream cheese
1 small loaf of bread

Directions

Grind the pimentos and mix them with the cream cheese to form a paste.
Trim the crust off the loaf of bread and slice it thin.
Spread the pimento and cream cheese paste on the 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.

Cream cheese + breadtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together166 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese: Provides fat and a soft, creamy texture that binds the filling and spreads easily.
Sweet pimentos: Add mild sweetness and flavour, plus a moist, soft texture to the paste.
Bread: Forms the structure that holds the spread and gives the sandwich its body.

“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.