Name: Salad Sandwiches
Ingredients: 24 thin slices of bread; butter; 2 small tomatoes; 1 very small lettuce; 1 bunch of garden cress; 2 tablespoons salad oil; 1 tablespoon vinegar; pepper; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Lettuce and garden cress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Salad Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Shred the lettuce and garden cress finely.
Mix the shredded salad with salad oil, vinegar, pepper, and salt.
Spread a little of the mixture on half of the buttered bread slices.
Cover with the other half of the bread, press together, and trim neatly.

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.

Lettuce + garden cresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together15 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

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

Swap the garden cress

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

Tarragonfits better
Parsleyfits better
Thymefits better
Garden cressthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, tomato, lettuce, vinegar, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.