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Cucumbers or Girkins, Wet

A preserved cucumber dish soaked in salt, water, and syrup, then boiled and stored.

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

Prepare

  1. Wash cucumbers thoroughly and remove any spots.

  2. Soak cucumbers in a mixture of salt and water for 2–3 days.

  3. Drain cucumbers and scald them in a tub of water, then let them sit overnight.

  4. Drain cucumbers again and place them in a pan with 2 quarts of water and ½ pint of syrup.

  5. Boil cucumbers gently for 5 minutes.

  6. Let cucumbers sit in the tub again until the next day.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Drain the syrup.

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

  3. Boil the syrup.

  4. Add cucumbers to the boiled syrup and simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  5. Transfer cucumbers to a flat brown pan and cover them.

  6. Let cucumbers sit for 2 days.

  7. Drain the syrup.

  8. Boil the syrup for 1 minute and pour it over the cucumbers.

  9. The next day, boil cucumbers and syrup together for 3–4 minutes.

  10. Repeat this boiling for 5 days.

  11. Finally, place cucumbers in pots or a cream pan and 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
The main ingredient that softens and turns into pickles through repeated brining and boiling.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and seasons them during the initial soak.
Syrup
Sweetens the cucumbers and carries flavour into them as they simmer.

The step that matters

Repeated boiling in syrup. Cucumbers held in hot syrup for many days can turn soft or mushy if boiled too hard or too long. Gentle simmering keeps their texture firm while the syrup slowly penetrates.

“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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