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Salad

Cucumber Relish

A pickled cucumber relish with onions, salt, apple cider, vinegar, mustard seeds, and optional sugar and bay leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cider are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,238 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Cucumber Relish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Cut cucumbers lengthwise into ½-inch thick slices.

  2. Layer cucumbers and onions in a porcelain‑lined kettle, sprinkling salt between layers.

  3. Let stand overnight, then pour off the liquid.

Cook the relish

  1. Add apple cider and cider vinegar, and cook for 15 minutes.

  2. Sweeten the vinegar with sugar and add bay leaves while cooking.

  3. Remove the bay leaves before packing.

Pack

  1. Pack the mixture into an earthenware jar, sprinkling mustard seeds over each layer.

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. Apple + cidertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,238 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the crisp, watery bulk that the relish is built around.
Onions
Add sharpness and savoury flavour that mellows during cooking.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and onions, firming them for crunch.
Cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the relish and gives it its tang.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.

The step that matters

Pour off the liquid after standing overnight. Salt draws a large amount of water out of the cucumbers and onions. Pouring it off before cooking keeps the relish concentrated and prevents it from becoming diluted and soft.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, apple, cider, vinegar, sugar, mustard):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, apple, cider, vinegar, sugar, 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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