Name: Fish Sandwich
Ingredients: cooked fish, free from bones; slices of bread; butter; finely chopped pickle; mayonnaise

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 ↓

Fish Sandwich

Ingredients

Directions

Spread butter on the slices of bread.
Mix the cooked fish with finely chopped pickle and mayonnaise.
Spread the fish mixture on the buttered 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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,668 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,488 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

Cooked fish: Provides the main filling and protein, bound together with mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise: Adds moisture and richness, binding the fish and pickle into a spreadable filling.
Butter: Adds fat and flavour to the bread and keeps it from soaking up the filling.
Finely chopped pickle: Adds acidity and crunch that cut through the richness of the fish and mayonnaise.

“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.