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Cucumber Sandwiches

A chilled sandwich made with thinly sliced cucumber, creamed butter on bread, seasoned with salt, pepper, oil, lemon juice, or vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumber

  1. Peel the cucumber and slice it thinly.

  2. Season the cucumber liberally with coarse sea salt and let it drain on a fine sieve for about 1 hour.

  3. Dry the cucumber thoroughly and place it in a bowl.

  4. Sprinkle the cucumber with pepper, salad oil, lemon juice, or vinegar to taste.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread creamed butter on thin slices of bread.

  2. Cut out rounds of bread and place slices of cucumber between two rounds.

  3. Press the sandwiches together and arrange them slightly overlapping on a napkin.

  4. Garnish with parsley and serve.

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

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

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

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

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

Cucumber
Provides the fresh, crisp filling that forms the body of the sandwich.
Creamed butter
Adds fat and richness and creates a moisture barrier against the bread.
White or brown bread
Forms the structure that holds the filling and gives the sandwich its shape.
Salad oil
Adds fat and a smooth mouthfeel to the dressed cucumber.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the cucumber.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the cucumber thoroughly. Salting draws water out of the cucumber through osmosis. If moisture remains, it soaks into the bread and makes the sandwiches soggy, so the cucumber must be dried well before assembly.

Swap the cucumber

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

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

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