Name: Cucumbers for Relish
Ingredients: Cucumbers; Ice; Raw tomatoes (optional)

Why it works: Cucumber and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,405 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumbers for Relish

Ingredients

Cucumbers
Ice
Raw tomatoes (optional)

Directions

Prepare

Peel the cucumbers and cut them into thin slices.

Serve

Serve the cucumber slices in relish dishes with a piece of ice on top to keep them cool.
Optionally, add peeled raw tomatoes, thinly sliced, to the dish.

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.

Cucumber + tomatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,405 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers: Provide the main body, crisp texture and fresh moisture of the relish.
Raw tomatoes: Add juiciness and a mild acidity that brightens the cucumber.

“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.