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To Stew Cucumbers

A stew of sliced cucumbers cooked in gravy with cayenne, salt, mushroom ketchup, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and port wine work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 570 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

To Stew Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the cucumbers thickly.

  2. Flour the cucumber slices well.

Fry and stew

  1. Fry the slices in ghee or butter until golden.

  2. Transfer the fried cucumbers to a saucepan.

  3. Add 1 cup of gravy and season with cayenne, salt, mushroom ketchup, and port wine.

  4. Let the mixture stew for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Mushroom + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together570 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  4. Cucumber + mushroomtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together667 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Cucumber + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the bulk of the dish, softening as they stew into a tender, moist base.
Flour
Coats the slices so they brown in the fat and help thicken the sauce.
Ghee or butter
Fries the coated slices, adding browning and rich flavour.
Gravy
Provides the liquid in which the cucumbers stew, adding savoury depth.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and fruity depth to the savoury sauce.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury, umami flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the floured slices until golden. Flour browns quickly in hot fat, so heat that is too high scorches the coating before the cucumber is cooked, while heat too low leaves it pale and greasy. Even golden colour gives a flavourful crust that holds up during stewing.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, ghee, pepper, mushroom, ketchup, port wine):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, ghee, pepper, mushroom, ketchup, port wine. 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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