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Salad

Sliced Cucumbers

Thinly sliced cucumbers salted, drained, and dressed with lemon juice and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,067 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sliced Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the cucumbers and slice them very thin into a dish.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt, cover closely, and shake briskly to distribute the salt.

  3. Let stand for about 30 minutes.

  4. Drain off all the water.

Dress and serve

  1. Shortly before serving, pour over the juice of 1-2 lemons.

  2. Add cream if desired.

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

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

  2. Cucumber + creamtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together787 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Lemon + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Lemon and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,640 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

Cucumbers
Make up the bulk of the salad, providing crisp, watery texture once sliced thin.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumber slices, softening them and concentrating their flavor.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the salad and balances the mild cucumber.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow body that softens the sharp lemon.

The step that matters

Drain off all the water. Salting pulls a lot of liquid from the cucumbers. If it is not drained off, the salad turns watery and the dressing is diluted, so the flavor and texture suffer.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Cherryfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cream. 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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