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Sauce

White Cucumber Sauce

A sauce made from boiled cucumbers mixed with béchamel, egg yolks, vinegar or lemon juice, and optional veal gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,734 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyl acetate, which smells fruit. The science ↓

White Cucumber Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Quarter the cucumbers and remove the seeds and skin.

  2. Cut them into 1-inch lengths and boil in salted water for 15 to 18 minutes.

  3. Drain and press through a sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix with the béchamel sauce, ensuring it does not boil again.

  2. For a richer flavor, boil cucumbers in seasoned veal gravy.

  3. Stir in beaten egg yolks and vinegar or lemon juice just 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 + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Cucumber + eggtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sauce + vinegartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,844 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Egg + vinegartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and vinegar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,922 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

Cucumbers
Provide the main vegetable body and fresh flavor once cooked and pressed into a purée.
Béchamel sauce
Forms the thick creamy base that the cucumber purée is folded into.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce with richness and help thicken it when gently heated.
Vinegar or lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks without boiling the sauce. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat and will curdle or turn grainy if the sauce boils again. Adding them just before serving, off the boil, keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Horseradishfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, egg, vinegar. 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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