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Salad

Cucumber Salad

A salad of thinly sliced cucumbers dressed with French dressing, optionally seasoned with garlic, onion juice, young onions, and chives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice cucumbers very thin.

  2. Soak cucumbers in iced water for 1 hour.

  3. Dry the cucumbers and place them in a bowl rubbed with garlic.

Serve

  1. Serve with French dressing.

  2. If desired, add onion juice or sliced young onions, and minced chives in season.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Onion + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Cucumber + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the crisp, watery body of the salad, which the iced soak firms up.
Garlic
Adds a sharp, aromatic flavor to the bowl as it is rubbed in.
French dressing
Supplies the fat and acidity that carry the salad's flavor.

The step that matters

Drying the cucumbers after the iced soak. Cucumbers are mostly water, and any surface moisture left on them will thin the French dressing and dilute its flavor. Drying them well keeps the dressing clinging and the salad crisp rather than soggy.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, clove, garlic, chive):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Welsh onionfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, clove, garlic, chive. 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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