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Cold Cucumber Pickles

Pickled cucumbers with vinegar, mustard, spices, and sugar, boiled and jarred.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 584 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cold Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Let the cucumbers stand in salt water for three days.

  2. Dissolve a little alum in ½ gallon of vinegar.

  3. Mix the cucumbers with the dissolved alum and vinegar.

Make the pickle

  1. Add the French mustard, onions, cauliflower, mustard seeds, celery seed, juniper berries, green peppers, and sugar, and mix thoroughly.

  2. Boil the mixture.

  3. Seal in jars.

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 + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together584 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Mustard + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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, becoming crisp-textured after salting and brining.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the pickle and gives it its sharp flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharp acidity of the vinegar with sweetness.
French mustard
Adds pungent flavour and emulsifying body to the pickling liquid.
Cauliflower
Adds bulk and a firm texture that holds up in the brine.
Alum (in the method)
Helps keep the cucumbers firm during pickling.

The step that matters

Let the cucumbers stand in salt water for three days. Salting draws water out of the cucumbers through osmosis, firming their texture so they stay crisp rather than turning soft in the vinegar brine.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, mustard, cauliflower, celery, pepper, 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.

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