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Tongue Sandwiches

A sandwich made with thinly sliced smoked tongue on buttered rye or white bread, optionally with mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rye and mustard share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tongue Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Slice the smoked tongue very thinly.

  2. Butter slices of rye or white bread.

  3. Place the sliced tongue between the buttered bread.

  4. Add mustard if desired.

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. Rye + mustardtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + mustardtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,003 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Rye + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together348 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Smoked tongue
Provides the main savory meat filling and most of the flavor of the sandwich.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the bread and keeps it from soaking up moisture from the filling.
Rye or white bread
Forms the structure that holds the thin tongue slices together.

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rye, butter):

  1. Beetrootfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Mustardthe original
  4. Lettucefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rye, 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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