Skip to main content

Cold Vinegar Pickles

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and dill match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 530 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cold Vinegar Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Scrub the small cucumbers.

  2. Make a brine strong enough to float an egg.

  3. Let the cucumbers stand in the brine for 24 hours.

  4. Spice the vinegar with dill, black pepper, cloves, and horseradish.

  5. Heat the spiced vinegar to boiling, then let it cool.

  6. Cover the pickles with the cooled vinegar and add a little of each spice to each jar.

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. Cucumber + dilltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together530 recipes

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

  2. Dill + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together134 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Dill + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,630 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, cider, vinegar, dill, pepper, horseradish):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cider, vinegar, dill, pepper, horseradish. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

FrittersFritters56 recipesCrisp CrackersCrisp Crackers7 recipes