Skip to main content
Main

Cucumber Pickles

A brined cucumber pickle made with cider vinegar, horseradish, spices, and grape leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 640 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Wash the cucumbers.

  2. Pour boiling water over the cucumbers.

  3. Let them stand for 18 hours.

  4. Remove the cucumbers.

  5. Make a brine with 1 pint of salt and 1 gallon of water.

  6. Pour boiling hot brine over the cucumbers.

  7. Let them stand for 24 hours.

  8. Wipe the cucumbers dry.

Pack and cover

  1. Pack the cucumbers in a jar.

  2. Add slips of horseradish and your chosen spices.

  3. Cover the cucumbers with cold cider vinegar.

  4. Place grape leaves on top of the cucumbers.

  5. The pickles are ready to use in 24 hours.

  6. The pickles will keep indefinitely if using pure cider vinegar.

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

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

  2. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  4. Cider + grapetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together349 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Vinegar + horseradishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
The main vegetable that becomes the pickle, softened and flavoured by the brine and vinegar.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and seasons them through the brine.
Cold cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that gives the pickles their sour flavour and helps preserve them.

The step that matters

Pouring boiling hot brine over the cucumbers. The brine must be fully boiling when poured so the cucumbers are heated evenly and the salt dissolves completely. Weak or lukewarm brine can leave the pickles soft or unevenly seasoned.

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, cider, vinegar, horseradish):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cider, vinegar, horseradish. 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 →

You might also like

Horseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesHam in CiderHam in Cider10 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes