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Stewed Cucumbers

Stewed cucumbers simmered in cream sauce with lemon juice.

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 ↓

Stewed Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and cut the cucumbers into one-inch pieces.

  2. Boil water in a pot and add the salt.

Simmer and stew

  1. Add the cucumbers to the boiling water and simmer for ten minutes.

  2. Strain the cucumbers and add them to a saucepan with the cream sauce.

  3. Stew for twenty minutes, then add the lemon juice.

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. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Sauce + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Main vegetable; they soften as they stew and release moisture into the sauce.
Cream sauce
Provides richness and a smooth, creamy body that coats the cucumbers.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream sauce and balances its flavor.

The step that matters

Stewing in the cream sauce. Cream can separate or curdle if it boils hard, so keep the saucepan at a gentle simmer during the twenty minutes of stewing. Lemon juice is added last because its acid can curdle dairy when heated with it.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cream, 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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