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Sauce

Cucumber Sauce

A sauce made from cucumbers, butter, and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,185 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Cucumber Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel the cucumbers, quarter them, and remove the seeds.

  2. Cut the cucumbers into small pieces.

  3. Place the cucumber pieces in a cloth to remove excess water.

Cook the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the cucumbers to the melted butter.

  3. Sauté the cucumbers over high heat until they are nicely colored.

  4. Pour the brown gravy over the cucumbers.

  5. Simmer gently for 10 minutes 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. Cucumber + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,185 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the bulk of the sauce and soften into a tender, moist base when cooked.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the cucumbers brown during sautéing.
Brown gravy
Supplies savory depth and liquid that combines with the cooked cucumbers into the sauce.

The step that matters

Sautéing the cucumbers over high heat. Draining excess water first lets the cucumber pieces brown rather than steam. Browning builds savory flavour through the Maillard reaction, while too much moisture would dilute the sauce.

“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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