Name: Lettuce Sandwiches
Ingredients: 1 crisp leaf of lettuce; 2 slices of buttered bread; coarse sea salt to taste; mayonnaise (optional)

Why it works: Lettuce and bread work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Lettuce Sandwiches

Ingredients

1 crisp leaf of lettuce
2 slices of buttered bread
coarse sea salt to taste
mayonnaise (optional)

Directions

Place a crisp, dry leaf of lettuce between two thin slices of buttered bread.
Sprinkle with coarse sea salt to taste.
Alternatively, spread mayonnaise on the bread instead of butter.

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.

Lettuce + breadtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together602 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce: Adds crisp, fresh texture and moisture between the bread slices.
Bread: Provides the structure that holds the sandwich together.
Butter: Adds fat and richness to the bread and helps keep moisture from soaking in.

“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.