Name: Croutons, Genoese Fashion
Ingredients: stale bread; butter; anchovy paste or anchovies in oil; heart leaf of lettuce; hard cooked eggs; chopped olives; whole capers; mayonnaise dressing; pickled beet

Why it works: Lettuce and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Croutons, Genoese Fashion

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cut rounds from stale bread for each person.
Spread lightly with butter and brown in a 400°F (200°C) oven.
Once cold, spread each round with anchovy paste.
Place a heart leaf of lettuce on each round.
Top each with a rounded teaspoon of egg salad.
To make the egg salad, chop hard cooked eggs and mix with chopped olives, whole capers, and enough mayonnaise to hold it together.
Garnish with a figure cut from pickled beet or finely chopped pickled beet.
Serve as an appetizer.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together372 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,688 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Anchovy + caperstop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together473 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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, anchovy, egg, olive, capers):

Shallotfits better
Chivefits better
Asparagusfits about as well
Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, anchovy, egg, olive, capers. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.