Skip to main content
Main

Cucumbers Dressed À LA Poalette

A salad of cucumbers dressed with butter, salt, and a light sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cucumbers Dressed À LA Poalette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut cucumbers lengthwise into quarters.

  2. Remove the seeds.

  3. Peel off the green skin.

  4. Cut the cucumbers into 2-inch long, 1-inch thick pieces.

Cook

  1. In a stew-pan, combine boiling water, butter, and salt.

  2. Simmer the cucumber pieces until three-quarters cooked.

  3. Drain the cucumber pieces.

  4. Place the cucumber pieces on a clean dish.

  5. Cut each piece in half and cover.

Finish and serve

  1. Warm the cucumber pieces in the juicette sauce using a bain-marie. 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. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Cucumber + saucetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Cucumber + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,185 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Make up the bulk of the dish and supply moisture and a tender bite when cooked.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the simmering liquid, giving the dish a rounder flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer the cucumber pieces until three-quarters cooked. Cucumbers are mostly water. Overcooking breaks down their cell walls, so they turn soft and release liquid, losing the texture that makes the dish work. Stop before they are fully tender.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Onionfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes