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Olive Oil Pickles

A pickled cucumber and onion salad preserved in olive oil, vinegar, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Olive Oil Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Sprinkle cucumbers and onions with coarse sea salt and let stand for 3 hours.

  2. Drain the cucumbers and onions.

Make the dressing and pour

  1. In a bowl, mix together white pepper, black pepper, celery seed, sugar, and olive oil.

  2. Add scalded cider vinegar to the mixture and stir well.

  3. Pour the mixture over the pickles.

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. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Cucumber + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Cucumber + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,745 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 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
Form the crisp, bulk body of the pickles.
Onions
Add savory flavor and aroma that mellow during pickling.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.
Cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickles.
Olive oil
Adds fat that carries flavor and gives a richer mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Drain the cucumbers and onions. Salting draws water out of the vegetables through osmosis. Draining them well removes that liquid so the brine stays strong and the pickles stay crisp rather than watery.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, pepper, celery, sugar, olive, cider):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, pepper, celery, sugar, olive, cider. 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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