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Salad

Frozen Cucumber Salad— Original

A chilled salad of cucumber flesh and seeds mixed with chives, onion, celery, dressing, mayonnaise, and spices, served frozen in cucumber hulls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Frozen Cucumber Salad— Original

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Cut a slice lengthwise from each of the 6 large cucumbers and remove the seeds and pulp. Soak the cucumber hulls in cold water until ready to use.

  2. Peel and chop the 2 whole cucumbers coarsely. Combine the chopped cucumbers with the seeds and pulp from the other cucumbers and let it stand in salted ice water for 1 hour.

Make and freeze the filling

  1. Drain the water, then add chives, grated onion, chopped celery, Durkee's dressing, mayonnaise, salt, and Tabasco sauce. Color the mixture with spinach green and freeze it.

Stuff and serve

  1. Once frozen, stuff the cucumber hulls with the mixture and place them on fresh crisp lettuce leaves to serve.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Spinach + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Chive + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Chive + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Cucumber + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together244 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Mayonnaise
Provides creamy fat and body, binding the filling so it holds together when frozen and sliced.
Cucumbers
Form the edible shells and the chopped filling base, supplying crisp watery texture and fresh flavor.
Chives
Add mild onion aroma and fresh flavor to the creamy filling.
Celery
Adds crunch and a fresh, mildly vegetal note to the filling.

The step that matters

Draining the chopped cucumbers before mixing. Cucumbers hold a lot of water. If the chopped cucumber is not drained well, excess liquid thins the mayonnaise base and can form ice crystals when frozen, leaving the filling watery and loose.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, chive, celery, sauce, spinach, lettuce):

  1. Endivefits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, chive, celery, sauce, spinach, lettuce. 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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