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Preserved Cucumbers

A sweet and spiced cucumber preserve made with sugar syrup, lemon, ginger, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Preserved Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Grease the cucumbers with vine leaves and alum.

  2. Wipe the cucumbers with a dry cloth.

  3. Season the inside of each cucumber with a mixture of bruised mace and lemon peel. Tie the piece back in with string.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine the cucumbers with 1 pound of loaf sugar and ½ cup of water for each pound of cucumbers in a preserving kettle.

  2. Add 1 beaten egg white for every 4 pounds of cucumbers.

  3. Boil and skim the sugar until clear.

  4. Add sliced ginger and lemon to taste.

  5. Pour the syrup over the cucumbers.

  6. Let them sit covered with a plate and weight for 2 days.

Finish and seal

  1. Boil the syrup again.

  2. Add half as much sugar as before, and the juice and grated peel of 2 lemons for every 6 cucumbers.

  3. Boil the lemon in the syrup for only 2 minutes.

  4. Strain the syrup over the cucumbers.

  5. Pack the cucumbers into small jars. Seal the jars tightly.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Cucumber + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Cucumber + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together973 recipes

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

  4. Mace + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the preserved body that absorbs the sugar syrup over several days.
Loaf sugar
Preserves the cucumbers and gives the syrup its sweetness and body.
Egg white
Clarifies the syrup, collecting impurities that are skimmed off as it boils.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the sweet syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until clear. Skimming the egg white and impurities as the sugar boils clarifies the syrup. Leftover foam left in the syrup can cloud it and spoil the preserve's appearance and keeping quality.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, lemon, sugar, egg, ginger):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, lemon, sugar, egg, ginger. 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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