Name: Cucumbers in Sauce
Ingredients: Cucumbers; Salt; White pepper; Finely-minced parsley; Yolks of 2 or 3 eggs; Butter; Flour

Why it works: Cucumber and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,564 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cucumbers in Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Peel and slice the cucumbers.
In a pan, melt butter and add the cucumbers.
Season with salt and white pepper as needed.
Cook until the cucumbers are tender.
Stir in finely-minced parsley.
Thicken the sauce with the yolks of 2 or 3 eggs.
Optionally, add flour after the cucumbers have stewed in the butter.

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.

Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,564 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together16,675 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Cucumber + flourtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
White pepper + parsleytop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,451 recipes

Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, parsley, egg, butter, flour):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Dillfits better
White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, parsley, egg, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.