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Sliced Mixed Cucumber Pickles

A pickled mixture of cucumbers, onions, red peppers, mustard, sugar, celery seed, horseradish, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sliced Mixed Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Salt and drain

  1. Place cucumbers and onions in a bag with a layer of coarse sea salt and let sit overnight.

  2. Squeeze the mixture to remove as much moisture as possible.

Make the brine

  1. Measure the brine that has drained off and add the same amount of vinegar.

  2. Stir in the ground mustard and mix all ingredients well.

Pack and seal

  1. Pour the mixture over the cucumbers and seal while hot.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Make up the bulk of the pickles and give them their crisp bite when kept well drained.
White onions
Add savory sweetness and aroma that mellows during the overnight salting.
White mustard seed
Adds sharp, pungent heat and a grainy texture to the brine.
Ground mustard
Thickens the brine slightly and adds pungent mustard flavor throughout.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Horseradish
Contributes a sharp, pungent aroma and bite to the finished pickles.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the moisture. Excess water left in the vegetables dilutes the pickling liquid and softens the cucumbers. Removing as much as possible keeps the brine strong and the pickles crisp.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, pepper, mustard, sugar, celery, 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.

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