Skip to main content
Main

Lettuce Sandwiches

A sandwich made with fresh lettuce, bread, butter, salt, and optional mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Lettuce Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Sprinkle fresh lettuce leaves with a little salt.

  2. Place the lettuce in a folded napkin for a few moments.

Assemble

  1. Butter slices of bread.

  2. Lay the salted lettuce between the buttered slices of bread.

  3. Spread mayonnaise over the lettuce 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Lettuce + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce leaves
Provides the crisp texture and fresh moisture that fills the sandwich.
Slices of bread
Gives structure, holding the filling together between its slices.
Butter
Adds richness and a fatty layer that helps keep the bread from soaking.
Mayonnaise
Adds creamy richness and fat that complements the lettuce.

The step that matters

Drying the salted lettuce in the napkin. Salt draws water out of the leaves, and any moisture left on them will soak into the bread and make it soggy. Drying the lettuce before it is layered keeps the sandwich firm and the bread intact.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes