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Oil Pickles

Cucumbers pickled in oil with salt, onions, mustard seed, celery seed, and vinegar.

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 ↓

Oil Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Layer cucumbers, onions, and salt in a colander and let stand overnight.

  2. Wash and drain the mixture.

Pickle

  1. Add mustard seed, celery seed, and olive oil.

  2. Transfer to a jar and cover with vinegar.

  3. Add a little sugar to improve and harden the pickles.

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. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, crunchy body of the pickles.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables, firming them and reducing moisture before pickling.
White onions
Add sharpness and aroma that flavour the pickled mixture.
Olive oil
Coats the vegetables and carries the flavour of the spices through the pickles.
Vinegar
Acidifies the mixture, preserving the vegetables and giving them their tang.
Sugar
Balances the acidity with sweetness and helps firm the pickles.

The step that matters

Drying after the overnight salting. Salt draws water out of the cucumbers and onions. Rinsing and draining thoroughly removes the excess salt and liquid, so the pickles stay crisp and are not overly salty in the jar.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, mustard, celery, olive, vinegar, sugar. 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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