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Pickled Onions

Pickled onions preserved in a spiced vinegar brine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel the small white onions.

  2. Boil a pot of water with coarse sea salt.

  3. Add a few onions at a time to the boiling water until they look clear.

  4. Carefully remove the onions and place them on a sieve to dry.

  5. Repeat until all onions are cooked and cooled.

Pickle

  1. In a pot, combine spiced vinegar with allspice, pepper grains, mace, cloves, and mustard seed.

  2. Boil the vinegar mixture.

  3. Pour the boiling hot vinegar over the pickled onions in jars.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  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 white onions
Provide the main vegetable, softened by brief heat and then flavoured by the pickling liquid.
Spiced vinegar
Supplies the acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the onions.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice notes to the pickling liquid.
Mustard seed
Adds a sharp, pungent aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Blanch the onions only until they look clear. Brief heat softens the sharp raw bite of the onions. Overcooking makes them soft and mushy, and the vinegar cannot restore a firm texture afterwards.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, vinegar, allspice, pepper, clove, 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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