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Cucumber Sandwiches

A sandwich made with thinly sliced cucumber, seasoned with salt, pepper, oil, lemon juice or vinegar, served on buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumber

  1. Peel the cucumber and slice it thinly.

  2. Season the cucumber slices liberally with salt.

  3. Drain the salted cucumber slices on a fine sieve for 1 hour.

  4. Dry the cucumber slices thoroughly.

  5. Sprinkle the cucumber with pepper, salad oil, lemon juice, or vinegar to taste.

Assemble and serve

  1. Prepare thin slices of buttered bread.

  2. Cut out rounds of suitable size from the bread.

  3. Place slices of cucumber between two rounds of bread.

  4. Press the sandwich together.

  5. Arrange the sandwiches slightly overlapping in a circle on a folded napkin.

  6. Garnish the sandwiches with parsley.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

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

  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

Cucumber
Forms the fresh, crisp filling; draining and drying keep it from soaking the bread.
Creamed butter
Spread on the bread that adds richness and helps keep moisture from reaching the slices.
White or brown bread
Provides the soft structure that holds the cucumber filling together.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the cucumber.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the mild, watery cucumber.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the salted cucumber. Salt draws water out of the cucumber through osmosis. If the slices stay wet, that moisture soaks into the bread and makes the sandwiches soggy, so they must be drained well and dried thoroughly before assembly.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, lemon, vinegar, pepper. 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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