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Salad

Cucumber Salad

A salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, watercress, and lettuce dressed with lemon juice, onion juice, and salad dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel the cucumbers and cut them in half.

  2. Remove the seeds and soak the cucumbers in cold, unsalted water for 1 hour.

Make the topping

  1. Peel and finely chop the tomatoes and watercress.

  2. Mix the tomatoes, watercress, and onion juice together; season with salt and pepper.

Assemble and serve

  1. Drain and dry the cucumbers, then place them on a bed of lettuce leaves.

  2. Cover the cucumbers with the tomato mixture.

  3. Pour lemon juice over the salad and add salad dressing 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. Watercress + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  3. Cucumber + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together140 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Watercress + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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 of the salad.
Tomatoes
Add juiciness and a mild acidic sweetness to the topping.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the salad.
Salad dressing
Adds fat and seasoning that coat the vegetables and carry flavour.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the cucumbers. Cucumbers hold a lot of water, and any left on the surface will dilute the dressing and make the salad soggy. Drying them well keeps the topping in place and the flavours concentrated.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, tomato, watercress, pepper, lettuce, lemon):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Broccolifits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, tomato, watercress, pepper, lettuce, lemon. 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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