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Ham Sandwiches

A sandwich made with boiled ham, mayonnaise, pickles, lettuce, and buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Ham Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Mince the boiled ham finely.

  2. Mix the minced ham with mayonnaise dressing.

  3. Chop the green pickles finely.

Assemble the sandwiches

  1. Cut the bread into very thin slices and butter them.

  2. Lay the buttered bread on a crisp lettuce leaf.

  3. Add the ham and pickle filling, then press both sides of the sandwiches together.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  3. Bread + lettucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Ham + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Ham + lettucetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together276 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled ham
Provides the savoury meat bulk of the filling.
Mayonnaise dressing
Binds the minced ham and adds moisture and richness to the filling.
Green pickles
Add acidity and a crisp, sharp contrast to the rich filling.
Bread
Provides the structure that holds the filling together.
Butter
Forms a fat barrier that slows moisture from the filling soaking into the bread.

The step that matters

Butter the bread thinly and evenly to the edges. Butter forms a fat barrier between the moist filling and the bread. Gaps in the butter let moisture soak in, softening the slices and making the sandwich soggy and hard to hold together.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, bread, butter):

  1. Onionfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, bread, butter. 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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