Skip to main content
Main

Ham Sandwiches

A sandwich made with a butter, mustard, and ham mixture spread on bread, optionally topped with pickles, capers, onion, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ham Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Add the mustard, salt, cayenne pepper, and beaten egg yolk; mix well.

  3. Combine the mixture with the finely minced ham.

Assemble

  1. Spread the ham mixture on thin slices of bread.

  2. Cut the sandwiches into desired shapes.

  3. If desired, add chopped pickles, capers, onion, and parsley.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Capers + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the other ingredients to form a rich, spreadable base for the filling.
Beaten egg yolk
Binds the filling and adds richness and smoothness.
Finely minced ham
Provides the main savory flavor and bulk of the filling.
Prepared mustard
Adds sharp, tangy flavor that balances the richness of the butter and yolk.

Swap the capers

The recipe marks capers as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, mustard, pepper, egg, ham, bread, onion):

  1. Capersthe original
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Thymefits less well
  4. Tarragonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mustard, pepper, egg, ham, bread, onion. 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