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Cucumber Sauce

A sauce made from cucumbers, butter, flour, stock, cayenne pepper, lemon juice, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel the cucumbers and remove the seeds, then cut the cucumbers into small pieces.

  2. In a saucepan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter and add the cucumber pieces.

  3. Cover with a lid and cook gently until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In another saucepan, melt the remaining butter and stir in the flour.

  2. Add the white stock and season with cayenne pepper and salt.

  3. Combine this mixture with the cooked cucumbers and strain through a fine sieve.

  4. Rewarm the sauce and add a few drops of lemon juice 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Cucumber + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

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

  3. Cucumber + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,991 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cucumber + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provide the main bulk and fresh flavour, softening into a smooth sauce body when cooked.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour while the cucumbers cook gently and forms the base of the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by forming a roux with the butter, giving it body.
White stock
Forms the liquid of the sauce, which the flour thickens and the cucumbers are blended into.

The step that matters

Cooking the cucumbers gently until tender. Cucumbers hold a lot of water, so cooking them covered over gentle heat softens them without browning or boiling away flavour, and the sauce stays smooth when strained.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, 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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