Name: Meat Sandwiches
Ingredients: leftover ham; sweet pickles; salad dressing; white or brown bread

Why it works: Ham and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,536 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Meat Sandwiches

Ingredients

leftover ham
sweet pickles
salad dressing
white or brown bread

Directions

Grind the leftover ham and sweet pickles together.
Mix the ground mixture with salad dressing.
Spread the mixture on slices of white or brown bread.

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.

Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,536 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Leftover ham: Provides the main savory meat filling and body to the sandwich spread.
Sweet pickles: Adds sweetness and acidity that balances the rich ham and dressing.
Salad dressing: Binds the ground ham and pickles together and adds moisture and tang.
White or brown bread: Serves as the soft base that holds and carries 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.