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Ripe Cucumber Pickle

A pickled cucumber dish made by soaking in brine and vinegar, sweetened with sugar and spiced with allspice, cinnamon, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Ripe Cucumber Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Pare and scrape out the inside of the cucumbers, then cut them lengthwise.

  2. Soak the cucumber pieces in weak brine for 24 hours.

  3. Remove the cucumbers, wipe them dry, and soak in weak vinegar for another 24 hours.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. In a pot, combine 1 quart of vinegar and 1 pound of sugar; boil until the sugar dissolves.

  2. Add spices to the vinegar mixture and boil for a few minutes.

Pickle and preserve

  1. Pour the hot vinegar over the cucumbers and add a little horseradish sauce to preserve.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cucumber + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

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

  5. Allspice + horseradishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Fully ripe cucumbers
Provide the main body of the pickle, whose firm flesh holds its texture through soaking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharp acidity of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives the pickle its tang.

The step that matters

Soaking in weak brine and weak vinegar. Salt and acid draw water out of the cucumbers and firm their texture. Skipping or shortening these long soaks leaves the pickles soft and less preserved, and the hot vinegar poured over them cannot fully make up for it.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, allspice, cinnamon, clove, horseradish, sauce):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, allspice, cinnamon, clove, horseradish, sauce. 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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