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Salad

Cucumber Salad

A salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, watercress, onion juice, lemon, oil, salt, pepper, served on lettuce.

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, cut them in half, and remove the seeds.

  2. Soak the cucumber halves in cold water for 1 hour.

  3. Drain the cucumbers and dry them with a soft cloth.

Make the tomato topping

  1. Peel and finely chop the tomatoes.

  2. Chop the watercress and mix it with the tomatoes.

  3. Add onion juice, salt, and pepper to the tomato and watercress mixture.

Assemble and serve

  1. Arrange the cucumbers on a bed of lettuce leaves.

  2. Top with the tomato and watercress mixture.

  3. Pour lemon juice and salad oil over the salad 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. 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
Forms the crisp, cool, watery base of the salad.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and a soft, juicy texture to the topping.
Watercress
Adds a peppery, fresh aroma and flavour to the tomato mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the salad.
Salad oil
Adds fat that carries flavour and gives a smooth mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Drying the cucumbers after soaking. Cucumber halves hold water from soaking. If they stay wet, the dressing and topping thin out and slide off. Drying them well lets the topping and oil cling to the surface.

Swap the onion

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

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

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