Skip to main content
Main

Cucumber Salad

A salad of thinly sliced cucumbers salted, rinsed, and tossed with lemon‑cream dressing, served on lettuce with cress and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel and slice the cucumbers very thinly.

  2. Place the slices in a large bowl and mix with the salt.

  3. Cover and let stand for 1 hour.

Rinse and dress

  1. Wash the cucumbers quickly in two waters to remove the salt.

  2. Mix the lemon juice with the thick sweet cream and pour over the cucumbers.

Serve

  1. Serve on lettuce leaves garnished with cress and 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. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 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

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, watery bulk of the salad once sliced thinly.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumber slices, softening them and concentrating their flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the cream and balances its richness.
Thick sweet cream
Adds fat and richness, coating the cucumber slices in a smooth dressing.

The step that matters

Rinsing after salting. Salt draws out moisture and flavour from the cucumbers; a quick rinse in two changes of water removes surface salt without washing away too much of the cucumber's flavour or letting it soak up water and turn limp.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, cream, lettuce, parsley):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cream, lettuce, 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.

More cucumber salad recipes

Tomato 18Pineapple 10Sweetbread 9French 6Creamed 5German 5 See all 179 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCreamy Lettuce SoupCreamy Lettuce Soup8 recipesLettuce SoupLettuce Soup8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes