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Salad

English Salad Pickles

A pickled cucumber and onion salad with mustard seed, celery seed, oil, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

English Salad Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the cucumbers and onions.

  2. Cover with ½ cup coarse sea salt and let stand pressed down overnight.

  3. In the morning, discard the liquid.

Pickle and store

  1. Add mustard seed, celery seed, salad oil, and cold vinegar.

  2. Store in tight jars and let sit for 48 hours before using.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  3. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 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
Form the crisp, bulky body of the pickle once salted and soaked in the brine.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables, firming them and helping them keep their crunch.
Cold vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its tang.
Salad oil
Adds fat and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the pickling liquid.
Mustard seed
Contributes a sharp, pungent flavor that deepens as the pickles rest.

The step that matters

Pressing the salted vegetables overnight. Salt draws out water through osmosis. If the vegetables are not fully covered and pressed down, they dry unevenly and soften, and the brine cannot penetrate them evenly, which weakens crispness and flavor.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, mustard, celery, vinegar. 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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