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Salad

Creamed Cucumbers

A chilled cucumber salad with sour cream dressing, seasoned with vinegar, sugar, salt, pepper, and topped with red pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Creamed Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel and slice the cucumbers very thin.

  2. Soak the cucumbers in strong salt water to cover them for about 3 hours.

  3. Squeeze out the cucumbers using a napkin.

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, combine the sour cream, vinegar, sugar, salt, and pepper.

  2. Whip the dressing until slightly thick.

Combine and serve

  1. Mix the dressing with the cucumbers and sprinkle red pepper on top.

  2. Serve very cold, garnished with chopped parsley.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Cucumber + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,991 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 crisp, watery vegetable base that the dressing coats.
Sour cream
Forms the creamy, tangy dressing that clings to the cucumber slices.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the cream and balances the sugar.
Sugar
Softens the sharpness of the vinegar and sour cream.

The step that matters

Squeeze out the cucumbers. Cucumbers hold a lot of water. If they are not squeezed dry after soaking, that water thins the sour cream dressing and makes the dish runny.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Peppermintfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cream, vinegar, sugar, 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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