Why it works: Cucumber and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 140 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓
Cucumber and Watercress Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Cut cucumbers into very thin slices.
Use a three-tined fork to make incisions around the edge of each slice.
Arrange the cucumber slices on a bed of watercress.
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.
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Cucumber + watercresstop 2% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together140 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
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