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Cucumber Sauce

A chilled cucumber sauce with onion, broth, and lemon juice, served with roast lamb.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cucumber Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and thinly slice the cucumbers.

  2. Soak the cucumber slices in salted cold water.

  3. Peel and slice the onion.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the cucumbers, onion, and enough broth or gravy to cover them.

  2. Stew for 15 minutes.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice or vinegar.

Serve

  1. Serve with roast lamb.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  3. Cucumber + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  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
Form the body of the sauce, softening as they stew and releasing moisture into the broth.
Onion
Adds savory aroma and mild sweetness as it softens during stewing.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the stewed cucumbers.

The step that matters

Stew for 15 minutes. Cucumbers are mostly water and soften quickly in hot liquid. Stewing them for the full time gives a tender sauce, while holding them too long can make them mushy and watery, so check them as the time nears its end.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Broccolifits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, pepper, lemon. 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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