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Cucumber Pickles

A preserved cucumber dish with salt, alum, peppers, horseradish, mustard seeds, pepper, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jars

  1. Wash the cucumbers well.

  2. Place them in fruit jars.

Pack and seal

  1. Add 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt, alum, red peppers, horseradish, black and white mustard seeds, and whole pepper to each quart.

  2. Fill the jars with cold vinegar and screw the lids on tightly.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

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

  4. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the main body of the pickles and take on flavour from the brine.
Cold vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickles.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and seasons the pickles.
Alum
Helps the cucumbers stay firm and crisp during pickling.

The step that matters

Fill the jars with cold vinegar and screw the lids on tightly. The vinegar must fully cover the cucumbers and the jars must seal well, because acidity and an airtight seal are what keep the pickles safe and stop spoilage from spreading.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Radishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, horseradish, mustard, vinegar. 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.

More cucumber pickles recipes

Sweet 23Green 9Spiced 9Small 7Sliced 6Sour 5 See all 334 →

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