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Cucumber Sweet Pickle

A sweet pickle made from cucumbers, sugar, vinegar, spices, and mustard seed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Cut the cucumbers into strips and soak them in cold weak brine for 24 hours.

Make the pickling syrup

  1. For every 10 pounds of cucumbers, combine 3 pounds of sugar and 1 quart of vinegar in a pot.

  2. Place ground cinnamon, cloves, and allspice in thin muslin bags and boil them in water to extract their flavor.

  3. Add the spice bags and the water to the vinegar mixture.

Cook and jar

  1. Cook the cucumbers in the vinegar until they can be pierced with a broom splint.

  2. Once cooked, jar the pickles and add about 2 teaspoons of mustard seed to each jar.

  3. Store in open jars, ensuring they are completely covered with juice.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the body of the pickle, becoming tender as they cook in the sweet vinegar.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their tang.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and flavor to the pickling liquid.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavor to the pickling liquid.
Allspice
Adds a warm, peppery aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking the cucumbers in the vinegar syrup. Cook until the cucumbers are just pierceable, not mushy. Overcooking breaks down the cell walls and makes them soft, while undercooking leaves them firm and unable to absorb the sweet, acidic liquid.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Radishfits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, allspice, mustard. 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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