Name: Green Sandwiches
Ingredients: 1 white loaf, finely cut; ½ cup chopped parsley; butter

Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Green Sandwiches

Ingredients

1 white loaf, finely cut
½ cup chopped parsley
butter

Directions

Make the sandwiches

Butter the slices of the white loaf.
Sprinkle chopped parsley on the buttered slices.
Stack the sandwiches cross-wise on plates.

Finish and serve

Decorate the center of the pile with a sprig of parsley.
Optionally, toss the parsley in a little onion juice if desired.

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.

Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together28,563 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

White loaf: Forms the bread slices that hold the filling together in each sandwich.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, and helps the parsley stick to the bread.
Parsley: Adds fresh, green herbal flavor and visual color to 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.