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Salad

Cucumber Salad

A salad of sliced cucumbers and onions pickled in vinegar and sugar with spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Combine cucumbers and onions in a bowl, sprinkle with coarse sea salt, and let stand for 4 hours.

  2. Pour off the salt water.

Make the dressing

  1. In a saucepan, combine vinegar, sugar, ground white pepper, ground mustard, ground ginger, grain mustard, and stick cinnamon.

  2. Boil the mixture hard for 15 minutes.

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. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  3. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, watery base of the salad that absorbs the dressing.
Onions
Add sharp aroma and savoury bite that mellows during the salting.
Vinegar
Supplies acidity that preserves the salad and gives it its tangy flavour.
White sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and onions, firming their texture.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture hard for 15 minutes. A full rolling boil dissolves the sugar and drives off harsh raw vinegar notes, so the spices blend into the dressing. A weak simmer leaves the flavour sharp and unevenly mixed.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, vinegar, sugar, mustard, ginger, cinnamon):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, vinegar, sugar, mustard, ginger, cinnamon. 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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