Skip to main content
Main

Winter Dill Pickles

A pickled cucumber dish flavored with dill, spices, horseradish, and green peppers, preserved in a hot brine with vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Winter Dill Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fill glass jars with pickles.

  2. Add mixed spices, horseradish, and green peppers.

Make the brine

  1. Boil 6 quarts of water with 13 ounces of coarse sea salt and 1 piece of alum.

  2. When boiling, add 1 quart of vinegar and remove from heat.

Pour and seal

  1. Pour the hot mixture over the pickles and seal immediately.

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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  2. Horseradish + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together389 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Horseradish + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Horseradish + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pickles
Form the main body of the jar and carry the dill and brine flavour.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their sharp, tangy taste.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the brine and helps draw flavour into the pickles while preserving them.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent aroma and heat that mellows during pickling.

The step that matters

Pour the hot mixture over the pickles and seal immediately. The brine must be hot when poured so it penetrates the pickles and the jar cools to form a vacuum seal. Delay lets the contents cool and weakens the seal.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, pepper, 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.

You might also like

Horseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes