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Egg Sandwiches

Egg Sandwiches made with boiled egg, salad dressing, mustard, cayenne pepper, onion, lemon juice, and butter on bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Egg Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the egg for 20 minutes, then shell it.

  2. Remove the yolk and run the white through a sieve.

  3. Mix the egg white with salad dressing, cayenne, mustard, minced onion, and lemon juice.

  4. If the mixture is not moist enough, add melted butter.

Assemble the sandwiches

  1. Cut the bread into thin slices and butter them.

  2. Spread a layer of the egg mixture on the bread, press together, and cut into triangles.

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. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the main body of the filling once the white is sieved and mixed.
Salad dressing
Adds moisture and tang so the chopped egg white holds together as a spread.
Mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the egg.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the filling.
Melted butter
Adds fat and moisture to loosen the filling if it is too dry.

The step that matters

Sieving the egg white. Pushing the cooked white through a sieve breaks it into fine particles, giving a smooth spread instead of lumpy, rubbery pieces that won't stay on the bread.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, mustard, lemon, butter, 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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