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Sweet Pepper and Cheese Tartines

A toasted Boston brown bread strip topped with cream cheese, sweet green peppers, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sweet Pepper and Cheese Tartines

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the buttered Boston brown bread into strips, each 3 inches long and 1 inch wide.

  2. Spread a thick layer of cream cheese or Neufchatel on each strip.

Assemble

  1. Sprinkle the chopped sweet green peppers over the cheese and add a few drops of lemon juice.

  2. Fold the strips over the mixture to close.

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

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

  2. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Bread + cream cheesetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Cream cheese + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together881 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese or neufchatel cheese
Forms a thick, creamy base that holds the pepper filling and gives a rich texture.
Sweet green peppers
Add crisp texture and a fresh, mildly sweet vegetable flavor to the filling.
Lemon juice
Adds a little acidity that brightens the cheese and peppers.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Pineapplefits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Cherryfits less well

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

“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.

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