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Cucumber Sandwiches

A light sandwich made with sliced cucumber, buttered bread, and seasoned with salt, pepper, oil, lemon juice, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cucumber Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumber

  1. Peel the cucumber and slice it thinly.

  2. Season the slices liberally with salt and drain on a fine sieve for 1 hour.

  3. Dry the cucumber slices thoroughly.

  4. In a bowl, sprinkle the cucumber with pepper, salad oil, lemon juice, or vinegar to taste.

Assemble and serve

  1. Prepare thin slices of buttered bread.

  2. Cut out rounds of suitable size.

  3. Place slices of cucumber between two rounds of bread and press them together.

  4. Arrange the sandwiches slightly overlapping in a circle on a serving plate and garnish with parsley.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

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

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 and the bulk of the sandwich.
Creamed butter
Spread on the bread, adding richness and moisture so the filling doesn't soak it.
White or brown bread
Forms the structure that holds and presses the cucumber filling.
Salad oil
Adds fat and a smooth mouthfeel to the dressed cucumber.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the cucumber's mild flavour.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the cucumber thoroughly. Salt draws water out of the cucumber slices. If they are not well drained and dried, the released moisture soaks into the bread and makes the sandwiches soggy.

Swap the cucumber

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

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

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