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Boston Girl's Sandwich

A sandwich made with white and brown bread, butter, mashed Boston baked beans, mustard pickles, salted watercress, and nasturtium petals.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 293 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boston Girl's Sandwich

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Butter one slice of white bread and one slice of brown bread.

  2. Spread a generous amount of mashed Boston-baked beans on one slice.

  3. Top with finely chopped mustard pickles, salted watercress, or nasturtium petals.

  4. Place the other slice of bread on top to complete the sandwich.

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 + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together293 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + mustardtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

  3. Beans + watercresstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together45 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  5. Bread + beanstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together332 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

Mashed boston-baked beans
Provides the thick, savoury filling that gives the sandwich its body and flavour.
Butter
Coats the bread, adding richness and moisture and keeping the bread from soaking up the filling.
Finely chopped mustard pickles
Adds sharp acidity that cuts through the sweetness and richness of the beans.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Beansthe original
  4. Almondfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, mustard, watercress. 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.

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