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Small Sour Pickles

A pickled cucumber dish with vinegar, salt, sugar, mustard, horseradish, and red pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Small Sour Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine vinegar, salt, sugar, and dry mustard in a bowl and let it stand overnight.

  2. Brush the cucumbers while dry, then wash and dry them.

Pack and seal

  1. Fill jars with the cucumbers.

  2. Slice the horseradish root and add it to the jars.

  3. Add the fresh red pepper to the jars.

  4. Pour the vinegar mixture over the cucumbers and seal the jars. No heat is needed.

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

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

  3. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Provides the sour acidity that defines the pickle and helps preserve it.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Cucumbers
Form the body of the pickle and take on flavor from the brine.
Dry mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent flavor to the brine.
Horseradish root
Adds a hot, sharp aroma and bite to the jars.

The step that matters

Pour and seal without heat. Because no heat is used, the vinegar mixture must fully cover the cucumbers and be sealed in right away. The brine's acidity does the work that heat would normally do, so the cucumbers need to stay submerged to flavor evenly.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, mustard, horseradish, pepper):

  1. Radishfits better
  2. Beetrootfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, mustard, horseradish, pepper. 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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