Skip to main content
Drink

Cucumber or Wine Sauce

A pickled cucumber sauce flavored with mustard, mace, pepper, Madeira wine, sugar, oil, and cider vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,281 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber or Wine Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Sprinkle sliced cucumbers with coarse sea salt and let them stand for 2-3 hours.

  2. Press out the water using a coarse linen cloth.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine white mustard seed, mace, black pepper, Madeira wine, white sugar, and sweet oil.

  2. Mix ground mustard with the oil and sugar, then gradually stir in the wine.

  3. Add enough cider vinegar to cover the mixture well.

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. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  2. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

Cucumbers
Provide the bulk of the pickle and its crisp, fresh texture once salted and pressed.
White sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that preserves the mixture and gives it a tangy bite.
Madeira wine
Contributes rich, fortified wine flavour to the sauce.
Ground mustard
Adds sharp, pungent heat that gives the sauce its character.

The step that matters

Pressing out the water from the salted cucumbers. Salt draws water out of the cucumbers by osmosis. If too much water remains, the sauce becomes diluted and loses flavour and texture, so the cucumbers should be pressed well before mixing.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, mustard, pepper, madeira wine, sugar, cider, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, mustard, pepper, madeira wine, sugar, cider, vinegar. 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.

You might also like

Raspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes