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Salad

Cucumber Salad

A chilled cucumber salad with garlic, French dressing, optional onion juice, young onions, and chives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel and slice cucumbers very thin.

  2. Soak cucumbers in iced water for 1 hour.

  3. Dry the cucumbers.

Assemble and serve

  1. Rub a bowl with garlic.

  2. Place cucumbers in the bowl.

  3. Serve with French dressing.

  4. If desired, add onion juice or sliced young onions.

  5. Minced chives can be added for extra flavor.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cucumber + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together244 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Onion + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Cucumber + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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 bulk of the salad, with thin slices giving a delicate bite.
French dressing
Adds acidity and fat that moisten the cucumbers and carry the salad's flavor.
Garlic
Leaves a light aromatic flavor on the bowl that lingers on the cucumbers.

The step that matters

Dry the cucumbers. After soaking in iced water, cucumber slices hold excess moisture on their surface. Drying them well keeps the dressing from being diluted and watering down the salad.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, clove, garlic, chive):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Welsh onionfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, clove, garlic, chive. 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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