Name: Egg and Cheese Sandwiches
Ingredients: 3 hard-boiled eggs; 1 ½ cups grated cheese; 2 tablespoons melted butter; salt to taste; cayenne pepper to taste; thin slices of bread

Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Egg and Cheese Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

Mash the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs.
Add the grated cheese and mix well.
Moisten the mixture with melted butter and season with salt and cayenne pepper.

Assemble and cut

Spread the mixture between thin slices of bread.
Cut the sandwiches into shapes like squares, diamonds, or triangles.

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.

Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,130 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,962 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled eggs: Yolks mash into a soft, creamy base that binds the filling together.
Grated cheese: Melts into the filling and adds richness and savoury flavour.
Melted butter: Adds fat and moisture so the mixture spreads smoothly and stays soft.

“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.