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Salad

Cucumber with Dressing

A simple cucumber salad dressed with lemon juice or vinegar, olive oil, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Cucumber with Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel the cucumbers and soak them in ice water for 1 hour.

  2. Slice the cucumbers and place them in a bowl.

Dress and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, mix lemon juice or vinegar, olive oil, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Pour the dressing over the cucumbers and 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Cucumber + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  5. Olive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 body and fresh flavor of the salad.
Olive oil
Adds fat that carries flavor and coats the cucumber slices.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the oil.

The step that matters

Soaking the cucumbers in ice water. Cold water firms the cucumber cells, which keeps the slices crisp. Salt in the dressing draws water out of cucumbers, so the dressing should go on just before serving to avoid a limp, watery salad.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, olive, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, olive, pepper. 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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