Name: Salad Sandwiches
Ingredients: sliced lettuce; watercress; mustard cress; mayonnaise sauce; thin slices of bread; butter

Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Salad Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare sliced lettuce, watercress, and mustard cress.
Mix lightly with mayonnaise sauce.
Spread the mixture between thin slices of buttered bread.
Press the slices together, cut into neat pieces, and serve.

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.

Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together307 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,356 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Watercress + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together293 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Mustard + saucetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,120 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Swap the lettuce

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

Horseradishfits better
Shallotfits better
Lettucethe original
Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against watercress, mustard, sauce, bread, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.