Skip to main content
Main

Cucumber Sauce

A sauce made from cooked cucumber blended with velouté, lemon juice, and green food coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,067 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cucumber Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the cucumber.

  2. In a pan, melt a little butter and add the cucumber slices.

  3. Cook slowly until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. Rub the cooked cucumber through a sieve.

  2. Mix the sieved cucumber with the Velouté sauce, lemon juice, and green food coloring.

  3. Heat the mixture and serve.

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 + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Cucumber + saucetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Cucumber + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,185 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

What each ingredient does

Cucumber
Provides the main flavour and, once puréed, the body of the sauce.
Velouté sauce
Forms the creamy base that carries the cucumber purée and gives the sauce its body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mild cucumber flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and gentle flavour while the cucumber softens in the pan.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until tender. Cooking the cucumber gently in butter softens it without browning, so the sieved purée stays pale and smooth rather than tasting cooked or stringy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, sauce, 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.

More cucumber sauce recipes

White 19for Fish 3 See all 106 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes