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Ripe Cucumber Pickles

A pickled cucumber recipe using salt, spices, horseradish, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Ripe Cucumber Pickles

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 ↓

Ripe Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel the cucumbers and halve them, then remove the inside and soft part with a spoon.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and let sit for 12 hours.

  3. Wipe dry with a towel and cut into pieces or strips.

Pack the jar

  1. Layer mustard seeds, cloves, and pepper in a jar, then add a layer of cucumbers.

  2. Add a piece of horseradish if desired.

Pickle

  1. Boil enough vinegar to cover the cucumbers and pour it over them once cooled.

  2. After a week, boil more vinegar and pour it over the 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Cucumber + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, watery body that the brine is absorbed into.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers, firming them and concentrating their flavour before pickling.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives the pickle its sharp, sour taste.
Mustard seeds
Add pungent, aromatic flavour that infuses into the cucumbers over time.

The step that matters

Drawing out water with salt. Salt needs the full 12 hours to pull moisture out of the cucumbers. Skipping or shortening this leaves them softer and more diluted, so the pickles lose crispness.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, mustard, pepper, horseradish, vinegar. 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.

More cucumber pickles recipes

Sweet 23Green 9Spiced 9Small 7Sliced 6Sour 5 See all 334 →

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