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Cucumber Relish

A pickled cucumber and onion relish seasoned with salt, spices, oil, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,668 recipes. Both carry gamma-decalactone, which smells peach, creamy. The science ↓

Cucumber Relish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the cucumbers and onions.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and let sit overnight.

  3. In the morning, wash and drain the cucumbers and onions.

Pack and cover

  1. Layer the cucumbers and onions in a jar with celery seed, peppercorns, and cloves.

  2. Drizzle 1 teaspoon of salad oil over each layer.

  3. Fill the jar with vinegar until full.

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. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  2. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cucumber + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,745 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  5. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, bulky body of the relish, which salting firms up.
Onions
Add sharp flavour and bulk that softens slightly in the brine.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and onions, concentrating flavour and firming the texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the relish its tang and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Salting overnight. Salt draws water out of the cucumbers and onions by osmosis. Draining them well afterwards keeps the relish crisp rather than watery, and the vegetables must be rinsed so the relish is not overly salty.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, celery, 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.

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