Name: Nut Sandwiches
Ingredients: peanuts; walnuts; pecans; almonds; cream; mayonnaise; French dressing; cream cheese or Neufchatel cheese; graham bread or brown bread or white bread

Why it works: Walnut and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 993 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Nut Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Chop the nuts finely.
Mix the chopped nuts with cream, mayonnaise, French dressing, or cream cheese.
Spread the mixture between slices of graham bread, brown bread, or white bread.

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.

Walnut + almondtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together993 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Walnut + pecanstop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together634 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Peanut + almondtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together305 recipes

Shared aroma: acetylpyrazine (roast).
Peanut + walnuttop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together241 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Pecans + almondtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together431 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

Swap the peanut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, pecans, almond, cream, cream cheese, bread):

Pistachiofits better
Brazil nutfits better
Hazelnutfits about as well
Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, pecans, almond, cream, cream cheese, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.