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Egg Sandwiches

A sandwich made with mashed hard‑cooked eggs mixed with mayonnaise, mustard, salt, pepper, and thinly sliced whites, served on buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Egg Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove the yolks from the hard-cooked eggs and mash them thoroughly.

  2. Add mustard, salt, and pepper to the yolks, then combine with enough mayonnaise to achieve a spreadable consistency.

  3. Slice the egg whites very thin.

Assemble and keep fresh

  1. Spread one slice of bread with the yolk mixture.

  2. Add a few slices of the whites.

  3. Place another slice of buttered bread on top.

  4. To keep sandwiches fresh, fold them in a damp napkin covered with a dry napkin or wrap in paraffin paper.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Mustard + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,484 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard cooked eggs
Provide the creamy yolk filling and the sliced white layer that give the sandwich its body.
Mayonnaise
Adds moisture and fat, letting the mashed yolks spread smoothly onto the bread.
Mustard
Adds sharpness that cuts through the richness of the egg yolks.
Thinly sliced bread
Provides the structure that holds the filling together.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the bread and helps keep it from soaking up moisture from the filling.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Mustardthe original

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