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Spiced Cucumber Pickle

A pickled cucumber recipe with spices, vinegar, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spiced Cucumber Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Slice the cucumbers and boil them in enough vinegar to cover for 1 hour. Set the cucumbers aside in the hot vinegar.

Make the pickles

  1. In a large bowl, combine the cold vinegar, brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, celery seed, mace, allspice, cloves, turmeric, horseradish, garlic, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Add the cucumbers to the mixture and stew for 2 hours.

Cool and store

  1. The pickles will be ready to use once they are cold.

  2. For thicker pickles, use double the quantity of cucumbers.

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 + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Cinnamon + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,009 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cucumber + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,745 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Ginger + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together988 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the main body of the pickle, softening as they absorb the spiced vinegar.
Cold vinegar
Provides sharp acidity that flavours the pickle and helps preserve it.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Turmeric
Gives the pickle its yellow colour and an earthy flavour.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, sweet aroma that defines the spiced character of the pickle.

The step that matters

Stew the cucumbers for 2 hours. Gentle, prolonged heat lets the spices and vinegar penetrate the cucumber. Too much heat or time breaks down the cucumber's cell walls, leaving the pickles soft and mushy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, celery):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, celery. 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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