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Dream Sandwiches

A sweet sandwich made with chopped pecans, raisins, apple, lemon juice, sugar, and buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and raisin work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 490 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Dream Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Chop the pecan nuts, raisins, and apple finely.

  2. Add the lemon juice and sugar, then mix thoroughly.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread the mixture thinly between slices of buttered bread, removing the crusts.

  2. Cut into desired shapes and serve.

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. Nuts + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Raisin + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pecan nuts
Add crunch and a rich, toasty flavor to the soft filling.
Raisins
Add sweetness and moisture, softening the filling.
Apple
Adds moisture and fresh, tart fruit flavor to the filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and slows browning of the chopped apple.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the lemon's tartness.
Buttered bread
Provides the structure that holds the filling and fat that adds richness.

The step that matters

Chop the pecan nuts, raisins, and apple finely. Fine chopping spreads the pieces evenly so the filling spreads thinly and holds together between the bread slices instead of tearing it or falling out.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, apple, lemon, sugar, bread):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, apple, lemon, sugar, bread. 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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