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Dessert

Best Sweet Pickle Ever Made

A sweet pickle made from watermelon rind and grape leaves, simmered with sugar, vinegar, cloves, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Best Sweet Pickle Ever Made

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rind

  1. Layer grape leaves and watermelon rinds in a kettle, sprinkling a little alum between layers.

  2. Cover with water and simmer on the back of the stove until clear, then cool on a dish.

Make the syrup and pickle

  1. For every pound of rind, combine 1 pound of sugar, ½ pint of vinegar, cloves, and cinnamon in a pot.

  2. Boil the mixture and pour it over the cooled rind in a jar.

  3. Repeat boiling the vinegar mixture for six mornings.

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. Grape + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,164 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Grape + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Grape + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,589 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Watermelon rind
Forms the bulk of the pickle and becomes tender and translucent when simmered.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the rind in the syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the pickle.
Alum
Firms the rind so it stays crisp through cooking.

The step that matters

Repeated boiling over six mornings. Reboiling the syrup over several days slowly draws sugar and vinegar into the rind, so the pickle cures evenly. Skipping or rushing the repeats leaves the rind less preserved and less flavoured throughout.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Grapethe original

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