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French Pickles

A pickled cucumber recipe with salt, vinegar, sugar, mustard seed, celery seed, turmeric, peppers, and onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

French Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sprinkle cucumbers with salt and let them stand overnight.

  2. In the morning, cover cucumbers with vinegar.

Make the pickles

  1. Add brown sugar, mustard seed, celery seed, turmeric, green peppers, and onions.

  2. Cook the mixture until it turns yellow.

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. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Celery + turmerictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cucumber + turmerictop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,102 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, bulky vegetable base of the pickles.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers, helping them stay crisp in the brine.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and gives the pickles their tang.
Brown sugar
Balances the acidity with sweetness and adds depth of flavor.
Turmeric powder
Gives the pickling mixture its characteristic yellow color.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and body to the mixture as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture until it turns yellow. Cooking drives off excess moisture and softens the vegetables while the turmeric colors the brine. Stopping too early leaves the pickles watery and pale, while cooking too long can make the vegetables mushy.

Swap the onion

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

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

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