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Pickled Cucumbers

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Pickled Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Clean the cucumbers well in cold water with a brush.

  2. Dissolve coarse sea salt in cold water and soak the cucumbers for three days.

  3. Remove the cucumbers and place them in pots with small onions, garlic, peppercorns, cloves, and a tied bunch of bay leaves, tarragon, and burnet.

  4. Pour boiling vinegar over the cucumbers to cover them completely.

  5. Seal the pots tightly once they are completely cool.

  6. Check the cucumbers every two to three days for the first three weeks, then once a week.

  7. If the vinegar turns white, discard it and the spices, replace them, and cover again with boiling 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Cucumber + tarragontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together274 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Cucumber + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Clove + tarragontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, garlic, tarragon, vinegar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, garlic, tarragon, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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