Skip to main content
Bread

Cheese Sandwiches

A cheese sandwich spread made with egg yolk, butter, cheese, salt, pepper, mustard, and vinegar or water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cheese Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Crumble the yolk of the hard boiled egg into a bowl.

  2. Add the melted butter and mix until smooth.

  3. Stir in the salt, pepper, and mustard, mixing well.

  4. Add the vinegar or water to achieve the desired thickness.

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. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  4. Cheese + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,805 recipes

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

  5. Cheese + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methylbutanol (malty, whiskey).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard boiled egg
Yolk gives a smooth, rich body to the spread.
Butter
Melted fat coats the other ingredients and makes the mixture smooth and rich.
Vinegar or water
Adds liquid to loosen the spread to the desired thickness.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cheese, pepper, butter, vinegar):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Asparagusfits less well
  4. Potatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cheese, pepper, butter, vinegar. 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.

You might also like