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Cucumber Sweet Pickles

A sweet pickle made from cucumbers, sugar, vinegar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Cucumber Sweet Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Soak cucumbers in saltwater for 7 to 10 days.

  2. Remove cucumbers, slice them into ¼ inch thick pieces, and soak to remove salt.

  3. Boil cucumbers in alum water for 30 minutes, then in ginger tea for 1 hour.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine water, vinegar, and sugar.

  2. Add cloves, cinnamon, and mace.

  3. Boil the mixture until the syrup thickens.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Ginger + teatop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together216 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the pickle itself; they soften and absorb the syrup during processing.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and, with the vinegar, builds the thick syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickles their sharp, preserving tang.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour to the syrup.
Cinnamon
Contributes sweet, warm aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until the syrup thickens. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar, so the syrup thickens. Stopping too early leaves a thin liquid, while overcooking can make it too dense or sticky.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon, ginger, tea):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon, ginger, tea. 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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