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Cucumber Pickles

Cucumber pickles made by boiling vinegar, spices, sugar, salt, and alum, then packing onions and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 and firm

  1. Scald the brine and pour it hot over the pickles for nine mornings.

  2. On the tenth morning, throw the pickles into cold water with dissolved alum and let them stand for several hours.

Make the pickling syrup

  1. Boil vinegar, mixed spices, brown sugar, and coarse sea salt together.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the pickles.

Pack and finish

  1. Pack a few small onions and pieces of horseradish in each jar and sprinkle with fine mustard seed.

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. Cucumber + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 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
The main vegetable, which softens in the brine and takes on its flavor.
Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their tang.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and seasons the brine.
Alum
Helps the cucumbers stay firm during long brining.
Mixed spices
Adds aroma and warm flavor to the brine.

The step that matters

Repeated hot brining over nine mornings. Pouring the brine hot each morning must be done consistently. Heat and salt slowly draw water out of the cucumbers and let flavor penetrate, so skipping days or letting the brine cool can leave the pickles soft or under-flavored.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Sesamefits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, sugar, onion, horseradish, mustard. 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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