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Cucumber Pickles

A spiced cucumber pickle made with cinnamon, allspice, cloves, alum, sugar, cider vinegar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash cucumbers thoroughly and soak them in salt water overnight.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. In a kettle, combine the spice bags, vinegar, alum, and sugar, and bring to a boil.

Cook and pack

  1. Add a few cucumbers at a time to the boiling mixture and cook for 3 minutes.

  2. Transfer the cucumbers to a 1-gallon jar.

  3. Cover the cucumbers with the vinegar mixture, placing the spice bags over the contents.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  5. Allspice + cucumbertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together501 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the crisp body of the pickle that the brine flavours and penetrates.
Cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their sharp tang.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with a mild sweetness.
Alum
Helps cucumbers stay firm during cooking by strengthening their cell walls.

The step that matters

Add the cucumbers to the boiling mixture a few at a time. Adding too many at once drops the liquid's temperature and slows its return to a boil, so the cucumbers cook unevenly and may soften. Small batches keep the brine boiling and the texture firm.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Horseradishfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, allspice, clove, sugar, cider, 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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