Skip to main content
Main

Albemarle Pickle

A pickle made from green tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, cabbages, peppers, sugar, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tomato and cucumber are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,405 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Albemarle Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the green tomatoes, white onions, cucumbers, cabbages, and green peppers very fine.

  2. Cover the mixture with salt and let it stand for 24 hours.

  3. Squeeze the mixture very dry.

Cook and bottle

  1. Add brown sugar, ground cinnamon, celery seed, white mustard seed, ground mace, ground cloves, and ground turmeric.

  2. Pour in enough vinegar to cover the mixture.

  3. Boil slowly for 1 hour before bottling.

  4. Dissolve the turmeric in a little cold vinegar and add it 5 minutes before removing from heat.

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. Tomato + cucumbertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  5. Cucumber + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together722 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

Green tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the chopped vegetable base that becomes the pickle.
Cucumbers
Add crisp texture and bulk to the chopped pickle mixture.
Cabbages
Add body and texture to the chopped vegetable base.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharp vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the pickle and sharpens its flavor.
White mustard seed
Adds sharp, pungent flavor to the pickle.

The step that matters

Squeezing the salted mixture dry. Salt draws water out of the chopped vegetables; if they are not squeezed dry, the extra liquid dilutes the vinegar and makes the pickle watery and less stable in the jar.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, cucumber, cabbage, pepper, sugar, cinnamon, celery):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, cucumber, cabbage, pepper, sugar, cinnamon, celery. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipes