Name: Pickled Cucumbers
Ingredients: small cucumbers; coarse sea salt; water; whole allspice; cloves; horse-radish; mustard seed; vinegar; pulverized alum

Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Select small, unbruised cucumbers and wash them in cold water.
Make a brine with salt and water strong enough to float an egg.
Cover the cucumbers with the brine in a pickling tub, weigh them down, and let them sit for 9 days.
After 9 days, wash the cucumbers in cold water and discard any soft or bruised ones.
Place the cucumbers in a preserving kettle, cover with hot water and cabbage leaves or a clean towel, and keep hot without simmering.
Once they are green, drain the cucumbers and layer them in jars with allspice, cloves, horse-radish, and mustard seed.
Cover the cucumbers with vinegar and add 1 teaspoon of pulverized alum to each jar.

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.

Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,874 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Cucumber + radishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together212 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Radish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together297 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,928 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,281 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

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, allspice, horse, radish, mustard, vinegar):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Turmericfits about as well
Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, allspice, horse, radish, mustard, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.