Name: Fish Sandwiches
Ingredients: 6 sardines; 2 eggs; 4 slices of thin bread; 2 ounces butter; Cayenne pepper to taste; Lemon juice to taste

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 ↓

Fish Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

Remove the skin and bones from the sardines and pound them in a mortar with the butter and cayenne pepper.
Spread the sardine mixture on half of the bread slices.
Squeeze a few drops of lemon juice over the sardine mixture.
Chop the hard-boiled eggs finely and sprinkle them over the sardines.

Assemble and serve

Top with the remaining bread slices, trim the edges, and cut into small sandwiches.
Serve on a dish garnished with pink shrimps or prawns.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sardines: Provide the main savoury flavour and the pounded body of the filling.
Butter: Binds the pounded sardines into a smooth, spreadable paste and adds richness.
Eggs: Chopped hard-boiled, they add a firm, mild texture and body to the filling.
Thin bread: Forms the soft outer layers that hold the filling together.

“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.