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Salad

Cucumbers and Onions

A salad of sliced cucumbers and finely chopped onions dressed with sour cream, vinegar, cayenne pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,050 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumbers and Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the onions very finely.

  2. Pare and slice the cucumbers.

  3. Sprinkle cucumbers with coarse sea salt and cover with ice water; let stand for 1 hour.

Assemble and serve

  1. Drain the cucumbers and add the chopped onions.

  2. Sprinkle with cayenne pepper and dress with a mixture of sour cream and vinegar.

  3. 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. Onion + cucumbertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  2. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,991 recipes

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

  5. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, watery bulk of the salad, which the salt draws out and firms up.
Onions
Add sharp, pungent flavor that mellows somewhat when finely chopped and mixed with the dressing.
Sour cream
Adds richness and creaminess to the dressing, softening the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of the sour cream.

The step that matters

Salting and resting the cucumbers. Salt draws water out of the cucumber slices through osmosis. Draining them well before dressing keeps the salad from becoming watery and diluting the sour cream dressing.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, cream, vinegar, pepper):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, cream, vinegar, pepper. 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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