Name: Garnish, Cucuimber, for Salmon
Ingredients: 3 pounds boiled pickled salmon; 1 good-sized cucumber

Why it works: Salmon and cucumber work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 513 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Garnish, Cucuimber, for Salmon

Ingredients

3 pounds boiled pickled salmon
1 good-sized cucumber

Directions

Prepare

Drain the liquid from the boiled pickled salmon.
Place the salmon on a serving dish.

Garnish

Cover the salmon completely with 2 to 3 layers of thin slices of peeled fresh cucumber.

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.

Salmon + cucumbertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together513 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon: Is the main dish, carrying the flavour and texture the garnish sits on.
Cucumber: Adds cool, crisp texture and fresh moisture that contrasts with the rich fish.

“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.