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Celery Sandwiches

A sandwich made with chopped celery, minced hard-boiled eggs, mayonnaise, and buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Celery Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Chop the celery into bits a quarter of an inch long until you have 1 cup.

  2. Mince the hard-boiled eggs and rub them through a coarse sieve.

  3. Mix the chopped celery with the sieved eggs and mayonnaise until well combined.

Assemble

  1. Spread the mixture between thin slices of buttered 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.

  1. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Celery + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,110 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Celery + eggtop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

White tender celery
Provides crisp texture and a fresh, mild vegetal flavor to the filling.
Hard-boiled eggs
Give the filling its body and a rich, creamy texture when mashed.
Mayonnaise
Binds the chopped celery and eggs together and adds moisture and richness.

The step that matters

Rubbing the eggs through a sieve. Pushing the minced eggs through a coarse sieve breaks them into fine, even crumbs, so the filling spreads smoothly and does not stay in lumps. Lumps can tear thin bread when spreading.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, bread):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread. 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.

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