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Salad

Cucumber Salad

A salad of thinly sliced cucumbers mixed with salt, lemon juice, sweet cream, served on lettuce leaves with cress and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel and slice cucumbers into very thin rounds.

  2. Place cucumbers in a large bowl and mix thoroughly with salt.

  3. Cover and let stand for 1 hour.

  4. Rinse cucumbers in two waters to remove salt.

Dress and serve

  1. Mix lemon juice with sweet cream and pour over cucumbers.

  2. Serve on lettuce leaves garnished with cress and parsley.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Lemon + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the main crisp, watery body of the salad once sliced thin.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumber slices, softening them and concentrating flavor before rinsing.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the cream dressing.
Thick sweet cream
Forms a rich, mild dressing that coats the cucumber slices.

The step that matters

Rinsing the salted cucumbers. Rinsing in two changes of water removes surface salt so the salad is not overly salty. Salt draws water out of cucumber cells through osmosis, so the rinse should remove salt without soaking the slices back to full crispness.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cream, lettuce, parsley. 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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