Skip to main content
Main

Dill Pickles

Pickled cucumbers with dill, peppers, horseradish, and spices in a brine of salt, alum, and cider vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and dill match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 530 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Dill Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Wash the cucumbers and cover them with cold water overnight.

  2. Drain, wipe dry, and pack the cucumbers tightly in stone jars with fresh dill between layers.

  3. Add 2 small red peppers, 1 teaspoon of peppercorns, 2 bay leaves, and 2 thin rounds of horseradish root to each half‑gallon jar.

Make the brine and seal

  1. In a pot, combine 6 quarts of water, 1 pound of rock salt, and 1 teaspoon of alum; heat to boiling.

  2. Add 1 quart of pure cider vinegar to the boiling mixture and pour it over the pickles, covering them well.

  3. Seal the jars tightly while hot.

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. Cucumber + dilltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together530 recipes

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

  2. Dill + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together134 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Dill + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,630 recipes

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

  5. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the pickles themselves, firm and crisp when cured in brine.
Rock salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and seasons the brine for a firm, preserved texture.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that lowers the pH and gives the pickles their sharp, tangy flavor.
Fresh dill
Contributes the characteristic herbal aroma of dill pickles.

The step that matters

Sealing the jars tightly while hot. Hot-packed jars that are sealed while the brine is still hot help drive air out and create a vacuum seal as they cool, which keeps the pickles from spoiling. Loose seals let air and microbes in.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Horseradishthe original
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Radishfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, dill, pepper, cider, 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.

You might also like

Horseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesHam in CiderHam in Cider10 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes