Skip to main content
Salad

Cucumber Catsup

A pickled cucumber relish made with cucumbers, onion, vinegar, salt, pepper, and optional horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 640 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grate the cucumbers and onion, and mix them well.

  2. Let the mixture stand for an hour or more.

  3. Drain off the excess water.

Season and bottle

  1. Add the vinegar, salt, black pepper, and grated horseradish if using.

  2. Bottle the mixture.

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 + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

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

  2. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  5. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the main bulk and fresh flavour of the catsup.
Onion
Adds sharp, aromatic flavour that balances the cucumber.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the catsup its tangy character and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Drain off the excess water. Cucumbers release a lot of liquid when grated and salted. If it is not drained, the catsup will be watery and dilute, so the vinegar flavour and body will be weaker.

Swap the horseradish

The recipe marks horseradish as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, vinegar, pepper):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, vinegar, pepper. 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

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes