Name: Cucumber Salad
Ingredients: 1 cucumber; French dressing; Chopped parsley

Why it works: Cucumber and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,564 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

1 cucumber
French dressing
Chopped parsley

Directions

Prepare

Peel the cucumber and cut it into very thin slices.
Arrange the slices neatly in a salad dish.

Dress and serve

Pour the French dressing over the cucumber.
Scatter a small amount of finely chopped parsley on top.

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.

Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,564 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cucumber: Provides the main body, crisp texture and fresh, mild flavour of the salad.
French dressing: Adds moisture and tangy, savoury flavour that coats the cucumber slices.

“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.