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Ripe Cucumber Pickles

A pickled cucumber recipe using salt, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Ripe Cucumber Pickles

Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ripe Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel the cucumbers and halve them.

  2. Scrape out the inside and soft part with a silver spoon.

  3. Sprinkle coarse sea salt over the cucumbers and let them sit for 12 hours.

  4. Wipe the cucumbers dry with a towel and cut them into pieces or strips.

Pack the jar

  1. In a jar, layer mustard seeds, cloves, and black pepper, followed by a layer of cucumbers.

  2. Add a piece of horseradish if desired.

  3. Boil enough vinegar to cover the cucumbers and let it cool.

  4. Pour the cooled vinegar over the cucumbers.

  5. After one week, boil more vinegar and pour it over the cucumbers again.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,245 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
Form the main body of the pickle and stay crisp when salted and kept in vinegar.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers, firming their texture before pickling.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives them their sharp, tangy flavour.
Mustard seeds
Add a pungent, slightly bitter aroma that infuses into the vinegar and cucumbers.

The step that matters

Wipe the cucumbers dry before packing. Salting draws out water, and leftover surface moisture would dilute the vinegar and weaken its preserving acidity, so the cucumbers must be patted dry before going into the jar.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Horseradishthe original
  2. Lettucefits about as well
  3. Radishfits about as well
  4. Shallotfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, mustard, clove, pepper, 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.

More cucumber pickles recipes

Sweet 23Green 9Spiced 9Small 7Sliced 6Sour 5 See all 334 →

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