Name: Sweet Sandwiches
Ingredients: thin slices of buttered bread; jam; jelly; preserves; candied fruits; orange marmalade; preserved ginger

Why it works: Orange and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,833 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Sweet Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Spread thin slices of buttered bread with your choice of jam, jelly, preserves, or candied fruits.
Cut the bread into fancy shapes or roll it up.
Use very fresh bread for rolling and secure the sandwiches with wooden toothpicks.
Cover the sandwiches with a damp napkin to keep them moist and let them sit for an hour before serving.

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.

Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,833 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Bread + orangetop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,084 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Bread + gingertop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together565 recipes

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