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Ripe Cucumber Pickle or Russian Bear

A pickled cucumber recipe using sugar, vinegar, spices, and onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Ripe Cucumber Pickle or Russian Bear

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Cut the cucumbers into rings, pare, divide into smaller pieces, and remove the seeds.

  2. Cook the cucumber pieces very slightly in salted water until just firm, then drain and place in a stone jar.

Make the syrup and pickle

  1. In a separate pot, combine sugar and vinegar, adding onion slices, cayenne pepper, allspice, cloves, and cinnamon to taste.

  2. Heat the vinegar mixture until the sugar dissolves, then pour it over the cucumbers in the 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.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the pickle's main body and crisp-firm texture once briefly cooked.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickle's flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and rounds out the sweetness.

The step that matters

Cooking the cucumber pieces in salted water. Cooking only very slightly, just until firm, keeps the cucumbers crisp; overcooking softens their cell walls, leaving a limp pickle.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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