Name: Egg Sandwiches
Ingredients: 4 hard boiled eggs; ⅓ cup mayonnaise; 8 slices of bread

Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Egg Sandwiches

Ingredients

4 hard boiled eggs
⅓ cup mayonnaise
8 slices of bread

Directions

Make the filling

Chop the hard boiled eggs.
Mix the chopped eggs with mayonnaise to create a paste.

Assemble

Spread the egg mixture on thin slices of bread.

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.

Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (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: Provide the main filling, giving the sandwich its body and rich texture.
Mayonnaise: Binds the chopped eggs into a spreadable paste and adds moisture and richness.
Bread: Supplies the structure that holds the filling and gives the sandwich its bite.

“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.