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Cucumber Soup

A chilled or warm soup made from cucumbers, onions, veal stock, cream, and thickened with arrowroot or rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cucumber Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel, split, and seed the cucumbers.

  2. Sprinkle with salt and let drain for 1 hour.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, combine cucumbers and the white part of the onions.

  2. Cover with veal stock.

  3. Simmer gently for 45 to 75 minutes until tender.

  4. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve and return to the saucepan.

  5. Add more stock to achieve desired soup quantity.

  6. Stir in arrowroot or rice flour to thicken as needed.

  7. Add boiling cream and season with salt and cayenne.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Cucumber + arrowroottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  3. Onion + arrowroottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

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

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 soup and give it its fresh, mild flavour once cooked down.
Onions
Add savoury depth and aroma as they soften in the stock.
Veal stock
Provides the liquid base and meaty savoury flavour of the soup.
Boiling cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety body to the finished soup.
Arrowroot or rice flour
Thickens the soup to the desired consistency as a starch.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 45 to 75 minutes until tender. Gentle heat softens the cucumbers evenly without boiling them hard, which can cloud the flavour and break the texture. Cooking until fully tender lets the sieved purée turn smooth.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, veal, pepper, cream):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, veal, pepper, cream. 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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