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Preserved Cucumbers

A method for preserving cucumbers by boiling, piercing, and cooking them in a sugar water solution.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,112 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Preserved Cucumbers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Boil the cucumbers for 2-3 minutes.

  2. Remove them from the water and pierce each cucumber in 3-4 places with a needle.

  3. Let the cucumbers drain.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. In a stewpan, combine the sugar and water.

  2. Add the drained cucumbers to the mixture and cook until the sugar dissolves.

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 + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,112 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Small well-formed cucumbers
Form the body of the dish and absorb the sweet syrup as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the cucumbers and forms the syrup they take up.

The step that matters

Pierce each cucumber in 3-4 places. The needle holes open the skin so the sugar syrup can pass into the flesh. Without them, the syrup mostly stays on the outside, and the cucumbers taste sweet only at the surface.

“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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