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Delicious Cucumber Pickle

A quick cucumber pickle made with cider vinegar, brown sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Delicious Cucumber Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak sliced onions in salt water.

Make the pickle

  1. In a kettle, combine cider vinegar, brown sugar, and turmeric, then season with cinnamon, cloves, allspice, mace, mustard seeds, celery seed, and curry powder.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Add cucumbers and onions, and boil until the pickles are a rich citron color.

Jar

  1. Let cool, then transfer to jars and seal.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Turmeric + cinnamontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,197 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Turmeric + clovetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,876 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Cucumber + turmerictop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,102 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumber pickles
Form the main body of the dish and absorb the spiced vinegar brine.
Onions
Add mild sweetness and soften in the hot brine, adding texture.
Cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickling liquid.
Brown sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness and depth.
Turmeric
Gives the pickles their yellow, citron colour.

The step that matters

Boil until citron colored. Boiling the cucumbers and onions in the vinegar brine lets the turmeric color them and the spices flavor them. Stop too early and the pickles stay pale and under-seasoned; boil too long and they soften and lose crispness.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cauliflowerfits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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