Skip to main content
Main

Green Cucumber Pickles

A pickle made by brining cucumbers with salt, then packing with onions, horseradish, spices, and hot vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Green Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brine

  1. Wash the cucumbers in cold water.

  2. Place them in large jars and cover with salt.

  3. Fill the jars with boiling water and let stand for 24 hours.

Pack and pickle

  1. Remove cucumbers from the brine and place in pickle jars with onions and horseradish in between.

  2. Tie alum, sugar, and spices in a bag and place over the cucumbers.

  3. Pour boiling hot vinegar and water over the cucumbers.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cucumber + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

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

  3. Allspice + horseradishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
The main vegetable; brining firms and seasons the flesh before it is pickled.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and seasons them during the brining stage.
Alum
Helps keep the cucumbers firm and crisp during pickling.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Peppercorns
Adds aroma and spice to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Remove cucumbers from the brine and place in pickle jars with onions and horseradish in between.. Salt draws water out of the cucumbers, so rinsing and packing them promptly keeps the texture firm and stops over-salting before the vinegar is added.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, vinegar, allspice, clove, sugar, horseradish):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Radishfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, allspice, clove, sugar, horseradish. 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.

More cucumber pickles recipes

Sweet 23Green 9Spiced 9Small 7Sliced 6Sour 5 See all 334 →

You might also like

Horseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes