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White Cucumber Sauce

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

White Cucumber Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the seeds from the cucumbers and cut them into 2-inch pieces.

  2. Soak the cucumber pieces in a mixture of vinegar and water for 1 hour.

  3. Simmer the cucumbers in veal broth seasoned with pepper, salt, and a little lemon juice until soft.

  4. Pour off the gravy and thicken it by stirring in the egg yolks.

  5. Warm the sauce gently, ensuring it does not curdle before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

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

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

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

  5. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

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

Swap the cucumber

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, veal, pepper, lemon, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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