Name: Cold Storage Vinegar
Ingredients: 1 gallon vinegar; 2 cups white sugar; ½ cup mustard; ½ cup chopped horseradish; 1 handful mixed spices; 1½ cap coarse sea salt; cucumbers (any size)

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 ↓

Cold Storage Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Combine vinegar, sugar, mustard, horseradish, mixed spices, and coarse sea salt in a gallon jar.
Wash cucumbers and place them in the mixture without soaking in brine first.

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.

Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Horseradish + cucumbertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together640 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Mustard + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,281 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Vinegar + cucumbertop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,734 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

Vinegar: Provides the acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives the pickle its sharp flavor.
White sugar: Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and rounds out the sweet-sour flavor.
Mustard: Adds a sharp, pungent flavor that comes through in the finished pickle.
Chopped horseradish: Contributes a pungent, sharp heat that infuses into the cucumbers.

Swap the cucumber

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

Radishfits better
Beetrootfits better
Shallotfits about as well
Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, mustard, 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.