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Cucumber and Onion Pickle

A pickled cucumber and onion mixture flavored with salt, vinegar, pepper, cloves, mace, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cucumber and Onion Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the cucumbers and onions.

  2. Lay them on a large dish and cover with crushed salt.

  3. Let them sit for 12 hours, then drain.

Pickle

  1. Place the cucumbers and onions in a large jar.

  2. Boil the vinegar to cover the pickles, adding the spices.

  3. Let it boil for 30 minutes, then strain and pour over the pickles while hot.

  4. Repeat the process by pouring off the vinegar and adding the spices again.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Make up the bulk of the pickle, providing the crisp texture that the brine is meant to preserve.
Onions
Add sharpness and aroma that mellow during pickling and soften slightly in the brine.
Crushed salt
Draws water out of the cucumbers and onions, firming them and removing excess moisture.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its sharp flavor.

The step that matters

Draining after the salt cure. The vegetables must be drained well after sitting in salt; leftover surface salt and moisture would dilute the hot vinegar and make the pickle watery and overly salty.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, vinegar, pepper, clove, ginger):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, vinegar, pepper, clove, ginger. 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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