Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Sandwiches

A sandwich made with finely chopped chicken mixed with cream, salt, pepper, onion, and lemon juice, spread between buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chicken Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Pound the chopped chicken until smooth, gradually adding the cream to make a paste.

  2. Mix in the salt, pepper, onion, and lemon juice.

Assemble

  1. Spread the mixture between thin slices of buttered 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.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked chicken
Provides the bulk and protein that the filling is built around.
Thick cream
Adds moisture and richness, binding the pounded chicken into a smooth, spreadable paste.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and cuts the richness of the cream.

The step that matters

Pounding the chicken with the cream. Adding the cream gradually lets the fine chicken fibres absorb it into an even paste. Adding it all at once can leave the filling loose and grainy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, cream, pepper, onion, butter, bread):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, cream, pepper, onion, butter, 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.

More chicken sandwich recipes

Filling 3 See all 34 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipes