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Vegetable Sandwiches

A sandwich made with sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, watercress, mayonnaise, butter, French dressing, and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Chop tomatoes and cucumbers, then mix with mayonnaise.

  2. Shred lettuce and watercress.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread butter on slices of bread.

  2. Spread the vegetable mixture on the buttered bread and assemble the sandwich.

  3. Spread mayonnaise on another slice of bread and mix shredded lettuce or watercress with French dressing.

  4. Assemble the sandwich and serve immediately.

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. Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  3. Cucumber + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together140 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Tomato + cucumbertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide juicy moisture and fresh, slightly acidic flavour to the filling.
Cucumbers
Add crisp texture and cooling moisture to the filling.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess that binds the chopped vegetables together.
Butter
Forms a fat barrier on the bread that helps keep it from soaking up moisture.
Lettuce
Adds crisp, fresh texture to the sandwich.
Watercress
Adds a peppery, fresh flavour and a crisp leafy texture.

The step that matters

Spread butter on the bread before the vegetables. Fat from the butter coats the bread surface, slowing moisture from juicy tomatoes and cucumbers from soaking in and making the slices soggy.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, lettuce, watercress, butter, 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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