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Cucumbers or Girkins, Wet

A method of preserving cucumbers by soaking in saltwater and boiling in syrup over several days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and syrup work together. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 90 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cucumbers or Girkins, Wet

Ingredients

Directions

Soak and scald

  1. Select clear cucumbers free from spots and soak them in saltwater for 2-3 days.

  2. Drain the cucumbers.

  3. Scald them in fresh water.

  4. Let them sit overnight.

  5. Drain again.

  6. Mix ½ cup of syrup for every 2 quarts of water. Boil the cucumbers in this mixture over low heat for 5 minutes.

  7. Let them sit in the tub again until the next day.

Make the syrup and simmer

  1. Drain the syrup.

  2. Prepare a clean pan with syrup of proper thickness.

  3. Boil the syrup.

  4. Add the cucumbers.

  5. Simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  6. Transfer to a flat brown pan.

  7. Cover.

  8. Let sit for 2 days.

Repeat and pack

  1. Drain the syrup.

  2. Boil it for 1 minute.

  3. Pour it over the cucumbers.

  4. Boil the cucumbers and syrup together for 3-4 minutes.

  5. Repeat for 5 days.

  6. Pack the cucumbers into pots or a cream pan.

  7. Cover.

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 + syruptop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together90 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 firm and crisp-textured as they soak and cook.
Salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and seasons them during the saltwater soak.
Syrup
Provides sweetness and concentrated sugar that sets the flavor and preserves the cucumbers.

The step that matters

Repeated boiling in syrup. Each boil and rest cycle drives syrup into the cucumbers gradually. Boiling too hard or too long can soften them and cloud the syrup, so keep it gentle and follow the rests.

“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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