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Sauce

Cucumber Sauce

A cucumber sauce with onions, vinegar, water, salt, pepper, veal stock, cullis, lemon, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Cucumber Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the cucumbers, cut them into quarters, remove the seeds, and cut each quarter into three pieces.

  2. Peel the small onions and let them soak with the cucumbers in vinegar and water for 2 hours.

  3. Drain the vinegar and water.

Make the sauce

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  2. Add enough veal stock to just cover the cucumbers and boil down to a glaze.

  3. Stir in cullis and boil for a few minutes.

  4. Squeeze in the lemon juice and add a little sugar.

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

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

  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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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
Provide the main vegetable body and fresh, crisp texture of the sauce.
Veal stock
Adds savoury body and, reduced to a glaze, concentrated flavour that coats the vegetables.
Cullis
Thickens and deepens the sauce, adding body and concentrated flavour.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich stock and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the vinegar and lemon.

The step that matters

Boil down to a glaze. Reducing the veal stock concentrates its flavour and sugars. Boiling too hard or too long can scorch the sauce or make it too salty, so watch it closely as it thickens.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, vinegar, pepper, veal, lemon, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Cauliflowerfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, pepper, veal, lemon, sugar. 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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