Skip to main content
Drink

Cucumber Pickles

A method for preserving cucumbers in a brine with onions, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Horseradish and mustard 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 ↓

Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Brine the cucumbers

  1. Place small cucumbers in a crock and pour boiling weak brine over them.

  2. Let them stand until the next day.

  3. Repeat this process three or four times.

Pack and pickle

  1. To a quart jar of pickles, add onions, cinnamon, horseradish, mustard seeds, and peppers.

  2. Heat vinegar and sweeten it slightly.

  3. Add a small piece of alum.

  4. Pack the pickles into jars.

  5. Pour the hot vinegar over them.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  5. Cinnamon + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together515 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

Small cucumbers
The main vegetable that becomes the pickles, firming and flavouring as it steeps in brine.
Vinegar
Provides the sour acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their tang.
Sugar
Adds a slight sweetness to the hot vinegar, balancing its sharpness.
Small piece of alum
Helps keep the cucumbers firm and crisp during pickling.
White mustard seed
Adds a pungent, sharp flavour to the pickling liquid and jars.

The step that matters

Repeated brining of the cucumbers. Soaking in boiling brine and letting them stand repeatedly draws water out of the cucumbers and firms their flesh. Skipping or shortening the repeats can leave the pickles soft and watery.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, cinnamon, horseradish, mustard, pepper, vinegar, sugar):

  1. Radishfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cinnamon, horseradish, mustard, pepper, vinegar, sugar. 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 →

You might also like

Raspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesSugar VinegarSugar Vinegar20 recipesCinnamon TinctureCinnamon Tincture10 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipes