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Cucumber Sweet Pickle

A sweet pickle made by boiling cucumbers with sugar, fruit, vinegar, spices, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Cucumber Sweet Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Soak cucumbers in fresh water until salt is extracted.

  2. Cut cucumbers into ¼ inch thick slices.

  3. Cover cucumbers with water, add alum, and boil for 30 minutes.

  4. Soak cucumbers in cold water to remove alum.

  5. Cover cucumbers with fresh water and add enough root ginger to make a strong tea. Boil for another 30 minutes.

Make the syrup

  1. In a separate pot, combine sugar, fruit, water, and vinegar to make a syrup.

  2. Add red peppers, cloves, mace, cinnamon, raisins, sliced lemons, celery seed, and black pepper to the syrup. Boil the mixture until the syrup thickens.

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. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Cucumber + cinnamontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together874 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the main body of the pickle, becoming crisp-tender as they cook in the syrup.
Alum
Helps the cucumber slices stay firm during the long cooking and soaking.
Brown or white sugar
Provides sweetness and, with the vinegar, the syrup that preserves and flavors the pickle.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the pickle.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture to the syrup.

The step that matters

Soaking to remove alum. Alum is used to firm the cucumbers, but leftover alum can make the pickle taste bitter or harsh. Thorough rinsing in cold water removes it before the syrup is added.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

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