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Salad

Cucumber and Tomato Salad

A chilled salad of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes served on lettuce with French dressing or mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 and Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Thinly slice the cucumbers and let them stand in a mixture of salt and water for 1 hour.

  2. Pour off the water and cover the cucumbers with chopped ice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Peel and slice the tomatoes, keeping them icy cold.

  2. Arrange the cucumber and tomato slices on lettuce leaves, leaning them against each other.

  3. Drizzle with French dressing or mayonnaise before serving.

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. Cucumber + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

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

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 body of the salad, which the salt soak firms and crisps.
Tomatoes
Add juicy acidity and sweetness, with their flesh holding shape when kept cold.
French dressing or mayonnaise
Adds fat and acidity, coating the vegetables and adding richness and flavour.

The step that matters

Drawing water out of the cucumbers. Salting the thinly sliced cucumbers draws out excess water through osmosis. Pouring it off before dressing keeps the salad crisp rather than soggy and diluted.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, lettuce. 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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