Skip to main content
Main

Cucumbers, with Cream Sauce

A cucumber salad sautéed with butter, seasoned, and finished with cream sauce and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cucumbers, with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and slice the cucumbers in half, then scoop out the seeds.

  2. Cut the cucumbers into scallops of the same size and place them in a bowl with cold water, salt, and vinegar.

  3. After 30 minutes, drain the water and dry the cucumbers with a napkin.

Cook

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the cucumbers, seasoning with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and sugar.

  2. Cover and cook on moderate heat until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Drain off the butter and stir in the cream sauce.

  2. Gently toss everything together and serve with chopped parsley on top.

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 + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 dish and turn tender and moist when cooked covered in butter.
Butter
Melts to coat the cucumbers and carries seasoning, adding richness to the dish.
Cream sauce
Adds creaminess and body, coating the cooked cucumbers in a smooth sauce.
Vinegar
Adds a mild acidity that brightens the cucumbers' flavor during the soak.

The step that matters

Drying the cucumbers after soaking. Excess water left on the cucumbers dilutes the butter and cream sauce and can make the finished dish watery, so they should be patted dry before cooking.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, butter, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, cream, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, butter, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, cream, sauce. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes