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Three Fillings for Sandwiches

A sandwich with lettuce, cheese, walnut-olive mayonnaise, and egg mayonnaise fillings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Three Fillings for Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cheese sandwich

  1. Place a lettuce leaf on a slice of buttered bread.

  2. Sprinkle grated cheese on the lettuce leaf.

  3. Cover with another slice of buttered bread.

  4. Cut the sandwich into desired shape.

Make the walnut-olive filling

  1. Mix chopped walnuts and olives.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise for every 1/2 cup of the walnut-olive mixture.

Make the egg filling

  1. Chop hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Mix the chopped eggs with 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise.

  3. Spread the egg mixture on a lettuce leaf.

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. Lettuce + walnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Walnut + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,087 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + cheesetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

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

  5. Bread + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,091 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Mayonnaise
Adds moisture and richness and binds the chopped fillings together.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add soft, creamy body and richness to the egg filling.
English walnuts
Add crunchy texture that contrasts with the softer filling.
Olives
Add briny, salty flavor to the walnut filling.
Grated cheese
Adds savory flavor and fat to the cheese sandwich.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, cheese, walnut, olive, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Lettucethe original
  4. Asparagusfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, cheese, walnut, olive, 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.

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