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New York Cucumber Pickles

A pickle recipe using cucumbers, brine, spices, vinegar, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

New York Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Make the brine

  1. Make a brine by mixing 1 pint of coarse sea salt with 1 gallon of water.

  2. Pour the boiling brine over small cucumbers and let them stand for 24 hours.

Pack the jars

  1. Rinse and drain the cucumbers, then pack them into glass jars.

  2. In each jar, add a small piece of horseradish, a small white onion, and 1 teaspoon each of black mustard seed, white mustard seed, celery seed, and juniper berries.

  3. Fill the jars with boiling vinegar and seal quickly.

  4. For each gallon of vinegar, add ½ pound of sugar.

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. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

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

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 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

Small cucumbers
Form the pickle itself, becoming crisp and tangy as they cure in brine and vinegar.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and seasons them during the brine stage.
Boiling vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the cucumbers and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling brine over the cucumbers and let them stand 24 hours. The salt must dissolve fully in the water so the brine is evenly strong. Uneven or weak brine lets the cucumbers soften or spoil instead of firming and curing.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Radishfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, horseradish, mustard, celery, 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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