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Fish Sandwiches

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove bones from anchovies or sardines and pound them to a paste.

  2. Moisten the paste with a little lemon juice or mix in finely chopped pickles, olives, or capers.

  3. Spread the mixture between thin slices of toasted bread or crackers, or plain buttered bread or crackers.

  4. Serve with lettuce or watercress as an accompaniment, or enjoy alone.

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. Capers + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Swap the lettuce

The recipe marks lettuce as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, olive, capers, bread, butter, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits about as well
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, olive, capers, bread, butter, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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