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Vinegar, Cucumber

A cucumber vinegar made by pickling cucumbers, onions, shallots, garlic, and spices in vinegar, then strained and bottled with peppercorns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Vinegar, Cucumber

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the cucumbers and onions thinly.

  2. Combine them in a pan with shallots, garlic, salt, ground pepper, and cayenne pepper.

Steep and bottle

  1. Add the vinegar and let it stand for 4 days.

  2. Strain the mixture through a flannel bag.

  3. Bottle the vinegar, adding 20 peppercorns to each bottle.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Cucumber + shallottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together264 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Cucumber + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the bulk of the flavour and a fresh, mild vegetable character as they steep.
Onions
Add savoury depth and pungency that mellows during the rest period.
Vinegar
Acts as the solvent and preserving base, drawing flavour out of the vegetables and aromatics.
Shallots
Contribute a mild onion-like sweetness and aroma to the infusion.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that softens and mellows as it infuses in the vinegar.

The step that matters

Let it stand for 4 days. Flavour is extracted slowly by the acid over time. Stopping early leaves the vinegar weak and harsh, so the full standing time matters.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, shallot, garlic, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, shallot, garlic, pepper, 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.

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