Skip to main content
Main

A Popular Sandwich

A sandwich with toasted bread, bacon, lettuce, mayonnaise, and sliced cold chicken.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

A Popular Sandwich

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut the bread into ½ inch thick slices and remove the crusts.

  2. Toast half of the slices delicately and spread a thin layer of butter on them.

Cook the bacon

  1. Broil the bacon until crispy and cut into thin slices.

Assemble and serve

  1. On the plain bread, layer the bacon, lettuce, mayonnaise, and sliced chicken.

  2. Top with a toasted slice of bread.

  3. Serve on lettuce leaves, garnished with parsley, or on a doily without garnish.

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. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Bread + chickentop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  5. Bread + lettucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Adds salty, smoky flavour and a crisp texture to the sandwich.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds moisture and richness that keeps the chicken and bread from drying out.
Sliced cold chicken
Provides the main protein and the bulk of the sandwich filling.
Bread
Forms the structure that holds the layered filling together.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the toasted bread and helps it brown.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, lettuce, chicken):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, lettuce, chicken. 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 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes