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Caviar Sandwiches

Caviar sandwiches are thin bread slices topped with caviar, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and creamed butter, then cut into shapes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Caviar Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare thin slices of bread.

Assemble

  1. Spread them lightly with caviar.

  2. Sprinkle with lemon juice and a little cayenne pepper.

  3. Take an equal number of slices of bread and creamed butter.

  4. Cover the caviar slices with the butter slices. Press lightly together.

  5. Trim the edges.

  6. Cut into square, triangular, or finger-shaped pieces.

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. Lemon + peppertop 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. Caviar + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together107 recipes

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

  4. Caviar + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together65 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Astrakhan caviar
Provides the main flavour and salty, briny richness that defines the sandwich.
Creamed butter
Adds fat and creaminess, softening the bread and balancing the salty caviar.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich caviar and butter.
Thin slices of bread
Forms the structure that holds the caviar and butter together.

The step that matters

Spreading the caviar lightly. Caviar eggs are delicate and can burst under pressure, releasing liquid that makes the bread soggy and the filling watery. A light, even layer keeps the eggs intact and the sandwich neat.

“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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