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Pickled Beets

Beets preserved in a spiced vinegar brine with cloves, peppercorns, mace, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Beets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beets

  1. Cleanse and boil the beets for 2 hours.

  2. Once cold, peel and slice the beets.

  3. Place the sliced beets into a jar.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. In a pot, boil 1 pint of vinegar with ½ ounce each of cloves, peppercorns, mace, and ginger.

  2. Allow the vinegar mixture to cool, then add another pint of vinegar.

  3. Cover the beets with the prepared vinegar.

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. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Mace + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Vinegar + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + gingertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,126 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Beets
Main vegetable; boiling softens them so they can be sliced and absorb the pickling liquid.
Vinegar
Acid that preserves the beets and gives the pickle its sharp, tangy flavour.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickling liquid.
Peppercorns
Contributes pungent, aromatic spice flavour to the pickling liquid.
Mace
Adds a delicate, warm aroma to the pickling liquid.
Ginger
Adds a fresh, warm, aromatic note to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Let the vinegar mixture cool before adding the second pint of vinegar. Adding the vinegar while the spiced liquid is still hot can drive off its aromatic compounds, so the flavours fade; cooling first keeps the spice character in the finished pickle.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, clove, ginger):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, clove, ginger. 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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