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Cucumber Croustade Cordon Rouge

A cucumber croustade served with a béchamel sauce, lemon, cream, and egg yolk, garnished with parsley.

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 ↓

Cucumber Croustade Cordon Rouge

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the croustade

  1. Cut the bread into a croustade shape, about 3 inches high, and fry it until golden.

  2. Peel or scrape the cucumbers, cut them into 2-inch pieces, and scoop out the seeds.

Cook the cucumbers

  1. In a stew pan, melt the butter and add the cucumbers. Season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and sugar.

  2. Moisten with white stock, cover, and let simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Dress the cucumbers in the croustade.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In the remaining fond, add béchamel sauce, lemon juice, and cream. Bring to a boil.

  2. Stir in the egg yolk and strain the sauce over the dish.

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

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Cucumber + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 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
Main vegetable that becomes tender and sweet when simmered in butter and stock.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and thickens it gently as it is stirred in without boiling.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the sauce, giving it a softer texture.
Béchamel sauce
Provides a creamy base that gives the sauce body and binds it together.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour for cooking the cucumbers gently at the start.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolk and strain the sauce over the dish.. Egg yolk thickens when heated but can scramble if the sauce boils after it is added. Keep the heat low and stir steadily so the sauce stays smooth.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, sauce, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, sauce, 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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