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Salad

Sweet Pepper Salad

A salad of sweet peppers, onion, cucumbers, seasoned with salt, pepper, and served with white French sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,050 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sweet Pepper Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the sweet peppers and onion.

  2. Soak sliced cucumbers in cold water with coarse sea salt for 1 hour.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix the chopped peppers, onion, and drained cucumbers.

  2. Sprinkle with black pepper and serve with white French sauce.

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. Onion + cucumbertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + cucumbertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,991 recipes

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

  4. Onion + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Cucumber + saucetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Onion and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet peppers
Provide the main crisp, fresh bulk of the salad.
Onion
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that balances the sweet peppers.
Sliced cucumbers
Add cool, crisp texture and moisture to the salad.
White french sauce
Adds creamy richness and moisture when served alongside.

The step that matters

Soaking the cucumbers in salted water. Salt draws water out of the cucumber slices by osmosis, so they must be drained well before mixing. Otherwise the salad becomes watery and diluted.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, onion, sauce. 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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