Name: Chicken Sandwiches
Ingredients: cold cooked chicken; finely chopped parsley; 1 hard boiled egg yolk; celery salt; onion juice; salad dressing (Boiled or Mayonnaise); 2 slices of bread; butter or salad dressing; 1 lettuce leaf

Why it works: Parsley and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chicken Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

Chop the cold cooked chicken very fine.
Add finely chopped parsley and the yolk of a hard boiled egg.
Pound these ingredients to a paste.
Season with celery salt and onion juice, then moisten with salad dressing.

Assemble the sandwich

Spread the mixture on one slice of bread.
Lay a lettuce leaf over the mixture.
Spread the remaining slice of bread with butter or salad dressing and place it on top.

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.

Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,518 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold cooked chicken: Forms the main body of the filling.
Hard boiled egg yolk: Pounds into a paste that binds the chicken and adds richness.
Salad dressing: Moistens the filling and adds fat and tang.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, parsley, egg, celery, onion, bread, butter):

Leekfits better
Potatofits better
Carrotfits better
Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, parsley, egg, celery, onion, 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.