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Olive Oil Pickles

Pickled cucumbers and onions seasoned with mustard seed, celery seed, white pepper, and olive oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Olive Oil Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Cut the onions, then cover them with cold water and let stand for three hours.

  2. Slice the cucumbers very thin and sprinkle with 1 cup of coarse sea salt.

  3. Let the cucumbers sit for three hours.

  4. Drain the cucumbers.

Pickle and store

  1. Mix the drained cucumbers with the onions, mustard seed, celery seed, and white pepper.

  2. Cover the mixture with cider vinegar and let stand overnight.

  3. Bottle the pickles for storage.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  3. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  5. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, firm body of the pickles; salting draws out water first.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and bulk that softens slightly as they stand in the brine.
Cider vinegar
Supplies the acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Olive oil
Adds fat and a mellow, rounded richness to the pickling liquid.
Mustard seed
Contributes a pungent, toasty bite that flavours the pickling mixture.

The step that matters

Draining the salted cucumbers. Salt pulls water out of the cucumbers, and if they are not drained well the excess liquid dilutes the vinegar and makes the pickles soft and watery.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, mustard, celery, olive, cider, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, mustard, celery, olive, cider, 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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