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Another Wav to Stew Cucumbers

A stew of cucumbers simmered in a savory gravy with ham, onion, garlic, herbs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Another Wav to Stew Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare the cucumbers and soak them in a mixture of vinegar, water, and salt for a while.

  2. Drain the cucumbers and place them in a saucepan.

Stew

  1. Add gravy, ham, onion with cloves, parsley, and thyme to the saucepan.

  2. Cover and stew until the cucumbers are tender.

  3. Remove the cucumbers and strain the gravy.

Thicken and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in flour, then boil it.

  2. Pour the thickened gravy over the cucumbers.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  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

Cucumbers
Main vegetable that becomes tender and soft through slow stewing.
Butter
Fat that combines with flour to form a roux, adding richness to the gravy.
Flour
Starch that thickens the gravy as it heats with the butter and liquid.
Gravy
Savoury cooking liquid that flavours the cucumbers and forms the sauce.
Vinegar
Acid that sharpens the flavour of the cucumbers during soaking.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in flour, then boil it. Flour must be cooked in the hot liquid long enough to swell its starch and thicken the sauce; boiling it fully prevents a raw, pasty taste and a thin, grainy gravy.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, ham, onion, clove, parsley, thyme, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, ham, onion, clove, parsley, thyme, butter. 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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