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Cucumber Pickles

A brined and vinegar pickled cucumber with spices, peppers, grapes, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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 the cucumbers

  1. Cover cucumbers with a weak brine and let stand for 24 hours.

  2. Remove cucumbers and wipe off any black specks.

  3. Place cucumbers in a large pot and add enough vinegar to cover them along with a small lump of alum.

  4. Heat slowly, stirring occasionally until scalded, then transfer to a crock and let stand for 24 hours.

Make the spiced vinegar and pickle

  1. Add sliced green peppers.

  2. In a separate pot, combine vinegar, brown sugar, mustard seed, cloves, cinnamon, celery seed, ginger root, and alum in a muslin bag.

  3. Scald the spice bag with vinegar in a porcelain kettle.

  4. Drain the first vinegar from the cucumbers and pour the spiced vinegar over them after it has cooled slightly.

  5. Add green grapes and horseradish when the mixture is cold.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. 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

What each ingredient does

Small green cucumbers
Form the main body of the pickles, absorbing brine and spiced vinegar to become crisp and flavorful.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives the pickle its sharp, tangy character.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and rounds out the spices.
Mustard seed
Contributes a pungent, warm flavor to the spiced vinegar.
Cloves
Adds warm aroma and spice flavor to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Heat slowly and stop at scalding. Heating the cucumbers gently until just scalded softens them without cooking them through, helping them stay firm. Boiling vigorously would make them mushy.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, vinegar, sugar, mustard, clove, cinnamon, ginger):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, sugar, mustard, clove, cinnamon, ginger. 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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