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Cucumber Sandwiches

A light sandwich made with thinly sliced cucumber, seasoned with salt, pepper, oil, and lemon 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 parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cucumber Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumber

  1. Peel and slice the cucumber thinly.

  2. Season the cucumber with salt and drain on a sieve for 1 hour.

  3. Dry the cucumber thoroughly.

  4. In a bowl, sprinkle the cucumber with pepper, salad oil, and lemon juice or vinegar to taste.

Assemble and serve

  1. Prepare thin slices of buttered bread and cut into rounds.

  2. Place cucumber slices between two rounds of bread and press together.

  3. Arrange the sandwiches in a circle on a folded napkin and garnish 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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

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

  5. Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumber
Provides the main fresh, crisp filling and moisture in each sandwich.
Creamed butter
Spread on the bread to add richness and help the cucumber stick to the slices.
White or brown bread
Forms the structure that holds the cucumber filling together.
Salad oil
Adds fat and a smooth mouthfeel to the dressed cucumber.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the cucumber.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the cucumber. Salt draws water out of the cucumber slices. If they are not drained and thoroughly dried, the moisture soaks into the bread and makes the sandwiches soggy.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

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