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Cucumber and Onion Pickle

A pickled mixture of cucumbers, onions, and peppers in hot vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Cucumber and Onion Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the cucumbers and onions.

  2. Salt them and let sit overnight.

  3. Drain the cucumbers and onions the next morning.

Pack and seal

  1. Add the green and red peppers, celery seed, cloves, and sugar.

  2. Press the mixture into jars.

  3. Pour hot vinegar over the mixture.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  3. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cucumber + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,745 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, bulk vegetable base of the pickle.
Onions
Add pungent flavor that mellows during the salting and pickling.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with a touch of sweetness.
Hot vinegar
Acidifies the mixture, preserving it and giving the pickle its tang.

The step that matters

Salting overnight. Salt draws water out of the cucumbers and onions through osmosis. Draining afterward removes this liquid, so the vegetables stay crisp rather than soggy in the finished pickle.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, pepper, celery, clove, sugar, 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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