Skip to main content
Main

Salad Sandwiches

A sandwich made with lettuce, watercress, mustard cress, mayonnaise, and buttered bread.

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

Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Salad Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the greens

  1. Wash and dry the lettuce and cress thoroughly.

  2. Shred the lettuce finely and remove the stalks from the cress.

Assemble the sandwiches

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and mix with the mayonnaise sauce.

  2. Place a layer of the mixture between thin slices of buttered bread.

  3. Press the sandwiches together, trim away the crusts, and cut into desired shapes.

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. Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Watercress + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together293 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Mustard + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,120 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Provides crisp, fresh bulk and a light texture to the filling.
Watercress
Adds a peppery aroma and a fresh, slightly sharp flavour.
Mustard cress
Adds a sharp, peppery flavour and a delicate crunch.
Mayonnaise sauce
Binds the greens together and adds fat, moisture and richness to the filling.

The step that matters

Drying the greens thoroughly. Any water left on the lettuce and cress dilutes the mayonnaise and soaks into the bread, making the sandwiches soggy. Thorough drying keeps the filling thick and the bread intact.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Lettucethe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against watercress, mustard, sauce, bread, butter. 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.

More salad sandwich recipes

Chicken 8Egg 8 See all 5 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes