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Rough and Ready Pickle

A pickled mixture of cucumbers, green tomatoes, bull-nose peppers, and silverskin onions with spices and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Rough and Ready Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the cucumbers, green tomatoes, bull-nose peppers, and silverskin onions.

  2. Salt each ingredient separately, then let them stand overnight.

  3. Press them dry the next morning.

Make the pickle

  1. Mix them together, chopping the onions and peppers finely.

  2. Add black pepper, allspice, white mustard seed, celery seed, horseradish, and cloves.

  3. Cover the mixture with vinegar and bring it to a boil.

  4. For every gallon of the mixture, add ½ pound of brown sugar.

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. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

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 pickle and give it a crisp, fresh texture once salted and pressed.
Green tomatoes
Add firm body and tart acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Silverskin onions
Contribute pungency and savory flavor that mellows during the long pickling.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the sharpness of the vinegar and spices.
White mustard seed
Provides sharp, pungent flavor that mellows in the vinegar brine.
Vinegar
Acts as the preserving liquid, adding sourness that gives the pickle its tang.

The step that matters

Salting and pressing the vegetables. Salt draws water out of the cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and onions. Pressing them dry before adding vinegar keeps the finished pickle crisp and stops the brine from being watered down.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, tomato, pepper, allspice, mustard, 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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