Name: Cucumber Sweet Pickle
Ingredients: 2 pounds cucumbers; 1¼ pounds sugar; 1 pint vinegar; cinnamon bark, to taste; cloves, to taste; mace, to taste; white mustard seed, to taste; green grape leaves

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 ↓

Cucumber Sweet Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Open the cucumbers and scrape out the seeds and pulp.
Soak cucumbers in water, changing the water daily until the salt taste is gone.
Combine sugar and vinegar in a pot and boil together.
Pour the hot mixture over the cucumbers for three days.
On the fourth day, add spices and mustard seed.
Cover with green grape leaves while boiling to enhance color.

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.

Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,189 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,281 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Cinnamon + mustardtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,581 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the mace

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

Allspicefits better
Cardamomfits better
Nutmegfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, mustard, grape. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.