Skip to main content

Meat Sandwiches

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Meat Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Spread butter or mayonnaise on the bread.

  2. Mix the meat with mayonnaise or fresh dressing.

  3. Add a crisp lettuce leaf or watercress with the meat.

  4. Chop chicken and celery together, then mix with mayonnaise.

  5. Thinly slice any kind of meat, season with salt, pepper, and mustard if using ham.

  6. Spread with mayonnaise or French dressing if desired.

  7. Chop or pound meats to a paste, mix with hard-boiled eggs, cream, salt, and pepper, and add onion juice if you like.

  8. For ham, mix with mustard, cream or mayonnaise, and chopped pickles or olives.

  9. Cook chicken livers until tender with onion, peppercorns, and salt, then chop finely and mix with cream or mayonnaise.

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 + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  2. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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 (bread, butter, chicken, celery, pepper, mustard, ham):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

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

More meat sandwiches recipes

You might also like