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Sliced Cucumber Pickles

A pickled cucumber recipe using sliced cucumbers, spices, sugar, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Turmeric and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,776 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Sliced Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the cucumbers.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. In a pot, combine garlic, horseradish, turmeric, black pepper, ginger, cinnamon, celery seed, cloves, allspice, mace, red pepper, sugar, and vinegar.

  2. Bring the mixture to a simmer.

Cook and jar

  1. Add the cucumbers and simmer for 2 hours.

  2. Remove from heat and transfer to 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. Turmeric + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cucumber + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

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

  4. Turmeric + cinnamontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,197 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Horseradish + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Green cucumbers
Form the bulk of the pickles, becoming tender and absorbing the spiced vinegar during simmering.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickles.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and adds sweetness.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and savory depth to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Simmering the cucumbers for 2 hours. Simmering for a long time softens the cucumbers and lets the spiced vinegar penetrate them. Heat that is too high can break the slices apart and make them mushy, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, horseradish, turmeric, pepper, ginger, cinnamon, celery):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, horseradish, turmeric, pepper, ginger, cinnamon, celery. 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.

More cucumber pickles recipes

Sweet 23Green 9Spiced 9Small 7Sliced 6Sour 5 See all 334 →

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