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Caviare Sandwiches

A sandwich made with caviar, butter, lemon juice, cayenne, and black pepper on bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Caviare Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sandwiches

  1. Spread thin slices of bread lightly with caviar.

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

  3. Prepare an equal number of slices of bread and spread with creamed butter.

  4. Press the caviar-covered slices and buttered slices together lightly.

Trim and cut

  1. Trim the edges and 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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + breadtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 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

Astrakhan caviare
Provides the salty, briny flavour that is the main point of the sandwich.
Creamed butter
Adds richness and a fatty layer that softens the bread and balances the salty caviar.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the caviar and cuts through the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Press the slices together lightly. Pressing too hard squashes the delicate caviar grains and pushes the butter out to the edges, spoiling the texture. Light pressure keeps the eggs whole and the layers intact.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Plumfits less well
  4. Mangofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, 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.

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