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Dessert

Sweet Pickles

A sweet fruit pickle made by preserving cherries, peaches, raspberries, tomatoes, plums, and crab apples in a sugar and spiced vinegar solution.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 163 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sweet Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Weigh the fruit and measure half that weight in sugar.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, bring spiced vinegar to a boil.

  2. Add the sugar to the boiling vinegar and stir until dissolved.

Pickle

  1. Pour the boiling vinegar mixture over the fruit.

  2. Let the fruit sit in the mixture while it cools.

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. Peach + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Plum + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Peach + appletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Tomato + plumtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,480 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Peach + tomatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out moisture.
Spiced vinegar
Provides acidity and flavour, helping to preserve the fruit.
Cherries
Main fruit, providing the bulk and flavour of the pickle.
Peaches
Main fruit, providing bulk, sweetness and soft texture.
Plums
Main fruit, providing bulk and tart flavour.

The step that matters

Dissolving the sugar in the boiling vinegar. Sugar must fully dissolve in the hot vinegar so the liquid is evenly sweet and the syrup can soak evenly into the fruit. Undissolved sugar can leave grains and uneven preservation.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peach, plum, crab, apple, sugar, vinegar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Cucumberfits about as well
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, plum, crab, apple, 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.

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