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Dessert

Cucumbers Ct LA Poulette

A French cucumber dish cooked with butter, flour, cream, egg yolks, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Cucumbers Ct LA Poulette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the cucumbers as for maitre-d'hotel.

Make the sauce and stew

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan and mix in the flour.

  2. Add the cucumbers and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Stew gently for 25 minutes.

  4. Gradually stir in the cream.

  5. A few minutes before serving, add the beaten egg yolks and lemon juice.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

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

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

Butter
Melts with the flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream sauce into a smooth, cohesive coating for the cucumbers.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce as they set gently with heat, adding richness.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the sauce's texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat. If the sauce is too hot when they go in, they can scramble and turn grainy, so add them off the heat or at low heat, a few minutes before serving.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

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