Name: Foie Gras Sandwiches
Ingredients: Foie gras pâté; Brown or white bread; Butter; Cress; Seasoning (if necessary)

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 ↓

Foie Gras Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the bread and butter very thin.
Spread half the slices with foie gras.
Scatter a little cress over the foie gras.
Top with the remaining slices and stamp out little rounds, or alternatively cut off the crusts and cut the sandwiches into neat squares.
Serve garnished with cress.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Foie gras pâté: Provides the rich, smooth filling that carries the flavour of the sandwich.
Brown or white bread: Forms the structure that holds the filling and gives each sandwich its shape.
Butter: Adds a thin layer of fat that keeps the bread from soaking up the filling.

“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.