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Sweet Ripe Cucumber Pickle

A sweet pickle made from sliced cucumbers, vinegar, sugar, spices, and raisins or grapes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sweet Ripe Cucumber Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Pare the cucumbers, remove the seeds, and slice them into ½-inch thick rings.

  2. Soak the cucumber rings in strong saltwater overnight.

  3. Pour boiling water over the cucumbers and let them stand for 1 hour.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. In a pot, boil the vinegar with hot water, sugar, allspice, mace, cloves, and cinnamon.

  2. Add the raisins or grapes for extra flavor.

  3. Once the vinegar mixture is boiling hot, add the cucumber rings and boil until fork-tender.

  4. Skim the cucumbers onto platters and boil the syrup for 10 minutes.

Jar and seal

  1. Place the cucumber rings into jars and pour the boiling syrup over them.

  2. Seal the jars tightly.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Large yellow cucumbers
Form the main body of the pickle and supply the crisp-tender texture once cooked.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives the pickle its sharp tang.
Sugar
Balances the acidity with sweetness and helps give the syrup its body.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumber rings, firming them before the syrup is added.
Allspice, mace, cloves, and cinnamon
Supply warm aromatic spice flavour that defines the character of the pickle.

The step that matters

Boiling the cucumbers until fork-tender. Cooking too long turns the cucumber rings soft and mushy, while too short leaves them raw. Acidic syrup also softens the flesh over time, so timing controls the final texture.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

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