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Sweet Pickled Yellow Cucumbers

A sweet pickle made by boiling cucumbers in a syrup of vinegar, sugar, cloves, and mustard seed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,281 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sweet Pickled Yellow Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel and quarter the cucumbers, removing seeds and soft parts.

  2. Place cucumbers in a porcelain dish and sprinkle with coarse sea salt. Let stand overnight.

  3. The next morning, wipe the cucumbers and weigh them.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Prepare a spiced syrup with vinegar, sugar, cloves, and mustard seed, and bring it to a boil.

  2. Add the cucumbers to the boiling syrup and cook until they are clear.

Pack and finish

  1. Pack the cucumbers into cans, and if there is excess syrup, cook it down until there is just enough to fill the cans.

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

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

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Clove + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,829 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  5. Cucumber + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,319 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the main bulk and crisp-tender texture once cooked in the syrup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the cucumbers in the syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickle its sharp flavour and helps preserve it.
Lemon
Adds bright acidity and aroma to balance the sweet syrup.

The step that matters

Cooking the cucumbers in the boiling syrup until clear. Cook too briefly and the cucumbers stay opaque and firm; cook too long and they turn soft and mushy. Salting and draining first removes water so the cucumbers absorb syrup rather than diluting it.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Cherryfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, sugar, clove, mustard, 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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