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Salad

Cucumber and Tomato Salad

A salad of lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, and mayonnaise, seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber and Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad base

  1. Place a bed of crisp lettuce in a salad dish.

  2. Layer sliced cucumber and sliced tomatoes on top.

Make the stuffed tomatoes

  1. For the second version, peel the tomatoes by dipping them in boiling water.

  2. Remove the centers of the tomatoes and turn them upside down to drain.

  3. Sprinkle the tomatoes with coarse sea salt.

  4. Fill the tomatoes with cucumber cubes mixed with mayonnaise.

Serve

  1. Serve on lettuce leaves.

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. Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Cucumber + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 recipes

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

  3. Lettuce + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumber
Provides crisp, cool, watery bulk that gives the salad its fresh texture.
Tomatoes
Add juicy moisture and acidity, and their centers drain off excess liquid when turned upside down.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess that binds the cucumber cubes and coats them richly.

The step that matters

Draining the tomatoes. Tomato centers hold a lot of water. Removing them and draining the shells upside down keeps the filling from becoming soggy and diluting the mayonnaise.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, cucumber):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, cucumber. 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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