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Cucumber Pickles

A preserved cucumber dish made by boiling cucumbers, then canning them in vinegar with sugar and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 640 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Soak cucumbers in boiling water, pouring off the water as it cools and repeating until all salt is extracted.

  2. Drain cucumbers well and place them in a preserving kettle.

Make the pickling liquid and can

  1. Add enough vinegar to cover the cucumbers, along with 1 teacup of sugar for every quart of vinegar and spices to taste.

  2. Boil until heated through, then can the pickles.

  3. For sour pickles, add pieces of horseradish, peppers, and whole black pepper to the vinegar, boil, and can as before.

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

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

  2. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Horseradish + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cucumber + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,991 recipes

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

  5. Vinegar + horseradishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
The main vegetable; soaking draws out the salt they were cured in.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives the pickle its sour flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.

The step that matters

Soaking until all salt is extracted. Cucumbers preserved in salt carry a strong salty taste; if soaking is cut short, residual salt will remain in the pickles and make them harsh. Repeated changes of hot water draw the salt out gradually.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, sugar, pepper. 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 →

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