Skip to main content
Main

Watercress Sandwiches

A sandwich made with watercress, hard‑boiled eggs, butter, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and stale bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Watercress and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 579 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Watercress Sandwiches

two dozen sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the watercress thoroughly and dry it in a cloth, pressing out all moisture.

  2. Mix the chopped hard-boiled eggs with the watercress, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  3. Slice the stale loaf into thin slices for two dozen sandwiches.

  4. Spread fresh butter on each slice of bread.

Assemble and cut

  1. Cut the watercress into small pieces, removing the stems, and place it between the slices of bread.

  2. Sprinkle a little lemon juice on the cress, press the slices together firmly, and cut into small squares, removing the crusts.

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. Watercress + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

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

  4. Watercress + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Watercress
Provides fresh, peppery flavour and the green filling that gives the sandwiches their body.
Hard-boiled eggs
Adds a soft, rich filling that binds with the greens and mellows their sharpness.
Fresh butter
Coats the bread so it does not soak up moisture from the watercress filling.
Stale loaf of bread
Stale bread holds its shape when thinly sliced and resists going soggy under the filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the greens and eggs.

The step that matters

Drying the watercress. Any water left on the cress will soften the bread and make the sandwiches soggy, so the leaves must be dried well before they go into the filling.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes