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Stewed Cucumbers

A stewed cucumber dish with ham, onion, herbs, and a vinegar-based sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stewed Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Cut off one end of the cucumbers and remove the seeds.

  2. Soak the cucumbers in vinegar, water, pepper, and salt.

  3. Fill each cucumber with the farce and dry them well.

Brown and stew

  1. Fry the cucumbers in butter until brown, then remove them.

  2. In a pot, combine the cucumbers, stock, onion, ham, and herbs; stew until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the liquid, strain it, and season with vinegar, lemon juice, sugar, salt, and white pepper.

  2. Glaze the cucumbers several times before serving.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  3. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  4. Cucumber + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender through slow stewing.
Farce
Stuffing that fills the cucumbers and flavours them from inside.
Butter
Fat for frying the cucumbers, adding browning and rich flavour.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth to the stewing liquid.
Ham
Contributes savoury, salty flavour to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Drying the stuffed cucumbers before frying. Excess surface moisture would keep the cucumbers from browning properly in the butter, and water spattering in hot fat is unsafe. Drying well lets the surface brown and form flavour before the stew.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, vinegar, pepper, onion, ham, lemon, sugar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, pepper, onion, ham, lemon, sugar. 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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