Name: Bacon and Mutton Sandwiches
Ingredients: slices of breakfast bacon; cold mutton, lamb, or veal; coarse sea salt; slices of bread; butter

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bacon and Mutton Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

Fry the bacon slices in their own fat until crispy, then let them cool.
Slice the cold mutton, lamb, or veal thinly and season lightly with salt.

Assemble the sandwiches

Butter one side of a slice of bread and place the meat on it.
Add one or two pieces of bacon on top of the meat.
Cover with another slice of buttered bread, butter side down.
Repeat until all ingredients are used.

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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Mutton + breadtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,488 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Mutton + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,781 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Breakfast bacon: Adds salty, crisp, savoury fat that contrasts with the soft bread and meat.
Cold mutton, lamb, or veal: Provides the main savoury meat filling and its rich, meaty flavour.
Bread: Forms the structure that holds the filling and soaks up some of the fat.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture to the bread and keeps it from soaking up juices too quickly.

“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.