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Oil Pickle

Cucumbers pickled in oil with onions, pepper, mustard, celery seed, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Oil Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Mix sliced cucumbers with salt and let stand for 1 hour.

  2. Soak sliced onions in cold water for 3 hours.

  3. Add dissolved alum to the onions to keep them firm and green.

Combine and pack

  1. Combine cucumbers, onions, white pepper, mustard, celery seed, and olive oil in a bowl.

  2. Add enough cold cider vinegar to ensure there is plenty of liquid.

  3. Pack the mixture into glass jars like fruit.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

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

  4. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  5. Cucumber + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, watery bulk that the salt draws moisture from.
Onions
Add sharp flavor and crunch that holds up through the pickling.
Olive oil
Adds fat and richness, coating the vegetables and carrying the spice flavors.
Mustard
Contributes pungent, sharp flavor that stands out against the sweetness-free brine.
Cider vinegar
Supplies acidity and the liquid that keeps the vegetables covered and preserved.

The step that matters

Add dissolved alum to the onions. Alum helps firm the vegetable tissue so the onions keep their crispness and color rather than going soft and dull. It must be fully dissolved in hot water first so it distributes evenly; undissolved pieces can leave uneven spots on the onions.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, pepper, mustard, celery, olive, cider, vinegar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, pepper, mustard, celery, olive, cider, vinegar. 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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