Name: To Pickle Cucumbers for Winter Salad
Ingredients: Cucumbers; Salt; Vinegar; Cloves of garlic (optional); Shallots (optional); Onions (optional); Ginger; Capsicums

Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Pickle Cucumbers for Winter Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cut cucumbers for salads and wind them into skeins of 3 to 4 inches long.
Sprinkle salt and a little vinegar on them.
Wring them in linen cloths to remove all juice.
Tie them in a way that allows easy removal from the jar.
Pack them with sliced garlic, shallots, or onions if desired.
Boil vinegar with ginger and capsicums, then pour it hot over the cucumbers.
Cover the cucumbers when the mixture is cold.

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.

Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,038 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together29,058 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Cucumber + shallottop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together264 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Cucumber + garlictop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,556 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Garlic + shallottop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,000 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, vinegar, garlic, shallot, onion, ginger, capsicum):

Cuminfits better
Turmericfits better
Corianderfits better
Clovethe original

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