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Egg Sandwiches

Egg Sandwiches made with hard-boiled eggs, lemon juice, onion, salt, pepper, and wheat bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Egg Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Boil the eggs and remove the yolks.

  2. Mash the yolks and mix in salt, pepper, lemon juice, and grated onion to taste.

  3. Add the finely chopped egg whites to the mixture.

Assemble

  1. Spread the mixture between slices of wheat 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.

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

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

  2. Wheat + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + wheattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together585 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the main body of the filling, with mashed yolks and chopped whites for texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich egg flavour.
Grated onion
Adds sharpness and aroma to the egg filling.
Wheat bread
Holds the filling and adds a nutty, earthy base.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, pepper, lemon, wheat, bread):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, lemon, wheat, bread. 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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