Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Cucumbers

Stewed cucumbers are cucumbers boiled with salt and served with drawn butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,185 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Stewed Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare the cucumbers and cut them into quarters, removing the seeds.

  2. Soak the cucumbers in cold water for 30 minutes.

Cook

  1. Cover the cucumbers with boiling water. Add salt.

  2. Boil gently until tender, about 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Carefully transfer the cucumbers to a vegetable dish. Pour drawn butter over the cucumbers. Serve.

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 + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,185 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the main body of the dish, softening into a tender, mild vegetable when boiled.
Drawn butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the cooked cucumbers.

The step that matters

Boil gently until tender. Boiling too hard can break the cucumber pieces apart and leave them mushy on the outside before the centre is tender. A gentle simmer cooks them evenly and keeps their shape.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes