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Salad

Cucumber Chow-chow

A pickled cucumber relish with onions, pepper, celery, mustard seed, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and mustard are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Cucumber Chow-chow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Finely chop the cucumbers, onions, and pepper.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and let sit overnight.

  3. In the morning, squeeze out excess liquid.

Make the chow chow

  1. Add finely chopped celery, celery seed, and yellow mustard seed.

  2. Cover the mixture with vinegar and heat gently without boiling.

  3. Jar the hot mixture immediately.

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. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Make up the bulk of the relish and supply its crisp, fresh texture.
Onions
Add sharpness and savoury depth that mellows during the salting.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the mixture and gives it a tangy flavour.
Yellow mustard seed
Adds a sharp, pungent flavour that develops as the seeds sit in the vinegar.

The step that matters

Squeeze out excess liquid. Salt draws water out of the vegetables by osmosis. If the liquid is not squeezed out, the relish stays watery and dilutes the vinegar, so it loses crispness and keeps less well.

Swap the onion

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

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

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