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Cucumbers or Girkins, Wet

A method of pickling cucumbers by soaking, boiling with syrup, and repeated steeping.

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 the cucumbers

  1. Select clear cucumbers free from spots.

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

  3. Drain the cucumbers.

  4. Scald the cucumbers in a tub of water.

  5. Let the cucumbers stand overnight.

  6. Drain the water again.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Prepare a new pan with 2 quarts of water and ½ pint of syrup.

  2. Boil the cucumbers in the syrup mixture over low heat for 5 minutes.

  3. Let the cucumbers stand in the tub again until the next day.

  4. Boil the cucumbers again.

  5. Drain the syrup.

  6. Boil the syrup in a clean pan until it thickens.

  7. Add the cucumbers to the syrup.

  8. Simmer gently for 15 minutes.

Rest and pack

  1. Transfer the cucumbers to a flat brown pan.

  2. Cover the cucumbers.

  3. Let them sit for 2 days.

  4. Drain the syrup.

  5. Boil the syrup for 1 minute.

  6. Pour the syrup over the cucumbers.

  7. Boil the cucumbers and syrup together for 3–4 minutes.

  8. Repeat this process for 5 days.

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

  10. Cover them.

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
Make up the pickle itself; their firm flesh is what the salt and syrup change over the days.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and firms them, helping them stay crisp while they cure.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and body to the liquid and coats the cucumbers, flavouring them as it reduces.

The step that matters

Repeated boiling and resting of the cucumbers. Each boil softens the cucumbers slightly while the rests let the syrup soak in. Boiling too hard or too long can turn them mushy, and skipping rests leaves the flavour shallow.

“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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