Skip to main content
Bread

Bacon Sandwiches

A sandwich made with crispy bacon, celery, olives, hard‑boiled eggs, mayonnaise, lettuce, and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Bacon Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Fry the bacon until crispy and drain on a wire rack.

  2. Once cooled, grind the bacon coarsely.

  3. Grind the celery, stuffed olives, and hard boiled eggs.

Assemble

  1. Mix all ingredients together, adding enough mayonnaise to create a spreadable consistency.

  2. Place the mixture between slices of bread with a lettuce leaf.

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. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Olive + breadtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,091 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Celery + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean bacon
Provides the savory, crisp-textured meat base of the filling.
Hard boiled eggs
Add soft, creamy body that binds the chopped filling together.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, giving the mixture a spreadable consistency.
Stuffed olives
Contribute briny, salty flavor that cuts the richness of the filling.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and fresh, mild crunch to the filling.

The step that matters

Adding the mayonnaise. Mayonnaise should be added gradually while mixing. Too little leaves the filling dry and crumbly, while too much makes it loose and soggy in the bread. Cooling the bacon first also keeps it from melting the mayonnaise.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, egg, lettuce, bread):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, egg, lettuce, bread. 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.

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesNut BreadNut Bread109 recipesWheat BreadWheat Bread65 recipes