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Salad Sandwiches

A sandwich made with lettuce, watercress, mustard cress, mayonnaise, and buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 the salad

  1. Wash and dry the lettuce and watercress thoroughly.

  2. Shred the lettuce finely and remove the stalks from the watercress.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt and mix with the mayonnaise sauce.

Assemble and cut

  1. Spread butter on thin slices of bread.

  2. Place a layer of the salad mixture between two slices of bread, pressing them together.

  3. Trim away the crusts and cut into desired shapes.

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 + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Watercress + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together293 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. 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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Provides the crisp, fresh bulk of the filling and moisture.
Watercress
Adds a peppery, fresh flavour to the salad filling.
Mayonnaise sauce
Binds the leaves together and adds richness and moisture to the filling.
Butter
Spread on the bread to add fat and keep the bread from soaking up moisture from the filling.
White or brown bread
Forms the structure that holds the filling and is pressed together into a sandwich.

The step that matters

Dry the leaves thoroughly. Any water left on the lettuce and watercress will dilute the mayonnaise and soften the bread, making the sandwich soggy. Drying before mixing keeps the filling thick and the bread firm.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Lettucethe original
  4. 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.

“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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