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Fruit and Nut Sandwiches

A sandwich made with raisins, dates, pecans, sugar, lemon juice, and egg, spread between buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Dates and pecans share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fruit and Nut Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Run the raisins, dates, and pecans through a food chopper.

  2. Beat the egg until light and mix it with the chopped mixture.

  3. Add the sugar and lemon juice, and mix well.

Assemble

  1. Spread the mixture between 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. Dates + pecanstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Dates + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Raisin + datestop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together358 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture to the filling.
Dates
Add natural sweetness and a soft, sticky body to the filling.
Pecans
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavor to the filling.
Egg
Beaten in to bind the chopped fruit and nuts together.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the dried fruit.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pumpkinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, egg, dates, sugar, pecans, 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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