Name: To Pickle Large Cucumbers
Ingredients: Large cucumbers; Coarse sea salt; Mustard seeds; Peeled shallots; Garlic; Small slips of horseradish; Mace; Boiling pickling liquid (as for India pickle or jerkins)

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 ↓

To Pickle Large Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Peel the cucumbers thinly and cut them in half, discarding the seeds.
Lay the cucumbers in coarse sea salt for one day.
Wipe the cucumbers dry and fill them with mustard seeds, shallots, garlic, horseradish, and mace.
Tie the cucumbers with twine and place them in jars.
Pour boiling pickling liquid over the cucumbers and cover them tightly until ready to use.

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).
Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together859 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together376 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together640 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

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

Swap the mace

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

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Dillfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, mustard, shallot, garlic, horseradish. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.