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Sweet Pickles

Fruit is boiled, then pickled in a sweet vinegar and sugar solution with cloves, allspice, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sweet Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Boil the fruit until it can be pierced with a straw.

  2. Place the fruit in jars.

Make the syrup and pack

  1. Boil the vinegar, brown sugar, cloves, allspice, and cinnamon for a few minutes.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the fruit in the jars.

  3. Seal and store away.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + appletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that preserves the fruit and balances the sweetness.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps make a thick, glossy syrup that flavours the fruit.
Whole cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour to the syrup.
Fruit
Forms the body of the pickle and soaks up the spiced, sweet syrup as it sits.

The step that matters

Boil the fruit until it can be pierced with a straw. The fruit must be tender enough to absorb the syrup, but not so soft that it falls apart. Stopping at the right point gives a firm texture that holds up in the jars.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Quincefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, clove, allspice, cinnamon, cucumber. 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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