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Cucumber Pickles

A method of pickling cucumbers using a brine, spices, brown sugar, vinegar, and heat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pickles

  1. Pour boiling water over the pickles and let them cool.

  2. Prepare a brine with 1 pint of coarse sea salt for every 100 pickles.

  3. Scald the pickles in the brine seven times, once a day.

  4. On the eighth day, wash the pickles and place them on the back of the stove for 5–6 hours to heat without boiling.

Pack and cover

  1. Pack the pickles in jars with the spices.

  2. Mix 3 pounds of brown sugar with 1 gallon of vinegar and pour it over the pickles while hot.

  3. Do not seal the 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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Celery + carawaytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together73 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Large pickles
The main ingredient, which is cured in brine and then preserved in the spiced vinegar.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and firms them during the repeated brine soaks.
Vinegar
Acid that preserves the pickles and gives them their sharp flavour.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
White mustard seed
Adds a pungent, earthy flavour to the spiced vinegar.

The step that matters

Scalding the pickles in brine over seven days. Repeated brine soaks slowly draw water out and firm the cucumbers; skipping or rushing the days leaves them soft and less crisp.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mustard, allspice, pepper, cinnamon, horseradish, celery, caraway):

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, allspice, pepper, cinnamon, horseradish, celery, caraway. 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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