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Nut and Chicken Sandwich

A sandwich made with chopped chicken, walnuts or almonds, olive oil, lemon juice, and butter on bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Nut and Chicken Sandwich

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Chop the white meat of a chicken and pound it to a paste.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, olive oil, and lemon juice.

Assemble the sandwiches

  1. Spread butter on the slices of bread.

  2. Press thinly sliced walnuts or almonds into the butter.

  3. Spread the chicken mixture on the other slices of bread.

  4. Press the slices together to form sandwiches.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Olive + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,087 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  4. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Chicken + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked chicken breast
Provides the main protein and the paste-like filling texture.
Olive oil
Adds moisture and richness to the chicken filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the chicken.
English walnuts or almonds
Adds crunch and nutty flavor against the soft filling.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor to the bread and helps the nuts adhere.

The step that matters

Pound the chicken to a smooth paste. If the chicken is left in coarse pieces, the filling will not spread evenly or hold together on the bread. Thorough pounding breaks the meat fibers so the oil and lemon juice blend in and the texture stays spreadable.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, olive, lemon, bread, butter):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Beansfits about as well
  3. Sesamefits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, olive, lemon, bread, butter. 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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