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Toast Sandwiches

A sandwich made with stale bread, toasted, buttered, and filled with potted meat or fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Toast Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut the crust from the stale bread and slice it very thin.

  2. Toast the slices until they are a delicate brown.

Assemble and serve

  1. Butter the toasted slices lightly and spread with potted meat or fish.

  2. Put two slices together and cut them into long strips with a sharp knife.

  3. Arrange the strips tastefully on a dish and serve at tea or evening parties.

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

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

  2. Bread + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Its drier crumb holds its shape when sliced thin and toasted crisp.
Potted meat or fish
Provides savoury richness and flavour that contrasts with the toasted bread.
Butter
Adds fat and a thin layer of moisture that softens the toast slightly and carries flavour.

The step that matters

Toast the slices until they are a delicate brown. Toasting only to a delicate brown dries the bread enough to stay crisp under the spread. Browning too far turns the sugars and starches bitter, and under-toasting leaves the slices soft and soggy.

“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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