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Cucumber Pickle

A pickled cucumber recipe with onions, cloves, celery seed, mace, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, vinegar, lemons, and fresh cucumbers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cucumber Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Brine and soak

  1. Prepare a brine and soak fresh cucumbers for two days.

  2. Soak cucumbers in fresh water until less salty.

Prepare and cook

  1. Wipe cucumbers dry and cut into one-inch thick pieces.

  2. Boil cucumbers in enough vinegar to cover until tender.

  3. Add seasonings and sliced lemons just before canning.

  4. Add 3 lbs of sugar if a sweeter pickle is desired.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh cucumbers
Form the pickle body, which softens and absorbs the brine and vinegar during cooking.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their sharp flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.

The step that matters

Boil cucumbers in enough vinegar to cover until tender. Cucumbers are mostly water and can turn mushy if boiled too long. Checking for tenderness often, rather than following a fixed time, helps them stay firm while the vinegar penetrates and preserves them.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, celery, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, vinegar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, celery, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, 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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