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Cucumber Sweet Pickle

A sweet pickle made by soaking cucumbers in salt, then boiling them in a sugar‑vinegar‑ginger syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Cucumber Sweet Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Brine

  1. Soak cucumbers in salt and water for 7 to 10 days.

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Slice cucumbers into ¼ inch thick pieces.

  2. Rinse cucumbers to remove salt and boil in alum water for 30 minutes.

  3. Boil cucumbers in ginger tea for 1 hour.

Make the syrup and pickle

  1. In a pot, combine 1 pint water, 1 quart vinegar, and 3 pounds sugar for every 4 pounds of cucumbers.

  2. Add cloves, mace, and cinnamon to the syrup.

  3. Boil the mixture until the syrup thickens.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Ginger + teatop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together216 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
The main vegetable that is firmed, flavored and preserved in the syrup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the pickles while thickening the syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickles their sharp flavor and helps preserve them.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers during the long soak, firming their texture.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until it thickens. Sugar and vinegar must be cooked to the right concentration; too little boiling leaves the syrup thin and the pickles less preserved, while overboiling makes it overly sticky and sweet.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, ginger, tea, vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, ginger, tea, vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon. 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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