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Cucumber À LA Maitre D’hotel

A sautéed cucumber dish flavored with butter, salt, pepper, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 1,564 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the cucumber

  1. Peel and quarter the cucumber, removing the seeds.

  2. Slice the quarters into slender finger-lengths.

Blanch

  1. Boil water with salt.

  2. Add the cucumber slices to the boiling water. Cook until limp.

  3. Strain the cucumber slices carefully.

Sauté and serve

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan. Add pepper, salt, and chopped parsley to the pan.

  2. Sauté the cucumbers until golden brown.

  3. 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Cucumber + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,564 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,118 recipes

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

  3. Butter + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together28,543 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together5,966 recipes

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

  5. Butter + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together85,512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumber
Forms the main body of the dish and softens when cooked, becoming tender while keeping some bite.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the cucumber slices brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Sauté the cucumbers until golden brown. Cucumber is mostly water, so it can steam rather than brown if it is wet or the pan is crowded. Draining well and giving the slices room in the hot butter lets moisture escape so the surfaces can caramelise.

Flavor stand-ins for the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Dillabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Tarragonabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, butter, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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