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Salad Sandwiches

A sandwich filled with paste of boiled chicken and tongue mixed with celery salt, cayenne pepper, anchovy paste, and mayonnaise, served on lettuce and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Salad Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a mortar, pound the chicken and tongue to a paste.

  2. Add celery salt, cayenne, anchovy paste, and mayonnaise; mix well.

  3. Set the mixture aside in a cold dish.

Assemble and wrap

  1. Dip lettuce leaves in tarragon vinegar and shake off excess.

  2. Place a lettuce leaf on a slice of bread, spread the meat mixture over it, and add another lettuce leaf.

  3. Top with another slice of bread, trim off the crust, and cut each sandwich in half.

  4. Wrap each piece in oiled confectionery paper.

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 + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together456 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the bulk and meaty body of the paste filling.
Tongue
Adds rich, savoury meat flavour and a dense, spreadable texture to the filling.
Mayonnaise
Binds the pounded meat into a moist, spreadable paste through its emulsified fat.
Anchovy paste
Adds a concentrated savoury depth that enriches the meat without tasting strongly of fish.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, anchovy, lettuce, tarragon, vinegar, bread):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, anchovy, lettuce, tarragon, vinegar, bread. 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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