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To Stew Cucumbers

A stew of sliced cucumbers cooked with gravy, spices, and a touch of port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

To Stew Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fry

  1. Peel and slice the cucumbers thickly.

  2. Flour the cucumber slices well.

  3. Fry the slices in butter until golden.

Stew and serve

  1. Transfer them to a saucepan and add 1 cup of gravy.

  2. Season with cayenne, coarse sea salt, mushroom ketchup, and a little port wine.

  3. Let them stew for 1 hour.

  4. Serve hot.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Mushroom + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together570 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Cucumbers
Form the bulk of the stew and soften into tender pieces during stewing.
Flour
Coats the slices so they brown in the butter and help thicken the sauce.
Butter
Fries the coated slices to a golden colour, adding richness and browning flavour.
Gravy
Provides the liquid base in which the cucumbers stew.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury, umami depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the floured slices until golden. Cucumber is mostly water, so it can leach liquid and turn soft if handled carelessly. Frying the flour-coated slices in hot butter browns the surface through the Maillard reaction, adding flavour and a sturdier coating before they stew.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, pepper, mushroom, ketchup, port wine):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, pepper, mushroom, ketchup, port wine. 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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